Kinski was saved by his dog from being burned to death in bed. It attacked Herzog as he crept up to set fire to the actor's house. Kinski made several attempts to return the compliment.

Their love-hate feud is the stuff of legend, but only now are the full details coming to light. Herzog lays the friendship bare in a documentary film, My Good Fiend.

'We had a great love, a great bond, but both of us planned to murder each other,' he said after the premiere at the Cannes film festival. 'Klaus was one of the greatest actors of the century, but he was also a monster and a great pestilence. Every single day I had to think of new ways of domesticating the beast.'

Herzog, who made five films with him often in extreme jungle locations said Kinski would scream abuse at him and tell him he would trample him into the mud.

Herzog refused to say how else he planned to kill Kinski. But, he did pull a gun on the actor on the set of Aguirre, Wrath Of God, and threatened to shoot him and then himself after Kinski tried to walk out.

He said: 'My crew would almost mutiny when they heard that Klaus was on board. They would say, 'How could you do this do us? We can't take this man a minute longer'. I don't like the term wild man, but Dennis Hopper was in the kindergarten compared with Klaus. I remember scenes where Klaus was attacked, and how the other actors used to take such pleasure in punching and kicking him. He was often quite badly hurt.'

Kinski's film star daughter, Nastassja, did not attend the screening. She was estranged from her father, who died in 1991, and threatened to sue him after he used his memoirs to insult his friends and family and boast of thousands of sexual conquests. Many of the 'revelations' in Everything I Need Is Love were contested as 'vindictive, libellous fantasies' by women he failed to seduce or had slighted him.

Kinski appeared in more than 200 films, including Dr Zhivago and many spaghetti westerns, usually playing a cameo of a psychopath, modelled on himself.

The tragedy, said Herzog, is that he was 'a genius. A terrifying genius. His intensity scared other directors.'

When Hollywood called, Kinski spat in its face. Steven Spielberg tried to cast him as the lead in Indiana Jones, but was told: 'This script is a yawn-making, boring, pile of shit.'