Dutch film actor Rutger Hauer, who specialised in thoughtful, menacing roles, including a memorable turn as a murderous android in Blade Runner opposite Harrison Ford, has died. He was 75.

Hauer's agent, Steve Kenis, said Wednesday the actor died on July 19 at his home in the Netherlands.

Rutger Hauer at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. Credit:Invision

Hauer's roles included a terrorist in Nighthawks with Sylvester Stallone, Cardinal Roark in Sin City and playing an evil corporate executive in Batman Begins. He was in the big-budget 1985 fantasy Ladyhawke, portrayed a menacing hitchhiker who's picked up by a murderer in the Mojave Desert in The Hitcher and won a supporting-actor Golden Globe award in 1988 for Escape from Sobibor.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro in a tweet called Hauer "an intense, deep, genuine and magnetic actor that brought truth, power and beauty to his films." Gene Simmons, the KISS bassist who starred opposite Hauer in Wanted: Dead or Alive, described his former co-star as "always a gentleman, kind and compassionate."