Jeroen Krabbé

Biography

In 2008 the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle showed a retrospective, “Jeroen Krabbé: Schilder”, in its building at the Paleis aan de Blijmarkt, bringing together his paintings from many years. For a man known around the world as a villain in a Bond film, this looks unexpected. In the Netherlands he has long been known as a landscape painter too.

He was born on 5 December 1944 in Amsterdam into a family of artists. His father, Maarten Krabbé, and his grandfather, Hendrik Maarten Krabbé, were well-known painters, and his mother, Margreet Reiss, translated texts for films. His older brother Tim Krabbé became a writer and chess player, and his half-brother Mirko works as an artist. That his mother was Jewish and that her family had perished in the Holocaust, Krabbé learned only as an adult. His maternal grandfather, Abraham Reiss, was deported to Sobibór in 1943 and murdered.

He spent a year at an art academy, and at seventeen was admitted to the Amsterdam drama academy. He took his final examinations in 1965 and received the Top Naeff Prize for his graduating year. He had made his film debut even earlier, in 1963, with a brief appearance in “Fietsen naar de maan”, and played his first significant role in 1968 in the Dutch-German film “Professor Columbus”, directed by Rainer Erler. From the mid-1960s he appeared in television series.

Recognition came with Paul Verhoeven’s films “Soldier of Orange” (1977) and “The Fourth Man” (1983), in which he played the writer Gerard Reve. In 1985 he directed a television staging of the diary of Anne Frank and played Otto Frank himself; according to accounts, before filming the actors spent a night in the Secret Annex on the Prinsengracht.

Then came Hollywood. His first American film was the comedy “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), followed by roles that fixed his typecasting as a villain: the Soviet general Georgi Koskov in the Bond film “The Living Daylights” (1987), the mobster Franco in “The Punisher” (1989), and Dr Charles Nichols in “The Fugitive” (1993), opposite Harrison Ford. He also appeared in “The Prince of Tides” (1991) and played Satan in the television film “Jesus” (1999). Critics and audiences remembered him above all as a “bad guy”, though, to my mind, his range is wider: in the film of Harry Mulisch’s novel he appeared as the archangel Gabriel.

As a director he made his debut in 1998 with “Left Luggage”, based on a novella by Carl Friedman, which he also produced. The film, about Orthodox Jews in Antwerp, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2001 he adapted Mulisch’s novel “The Discovery of Heaven”, and Edwin de Vries wrote the screenplays for both films. His next directing work, “Rico’s Wings”, is dated to 2009.

He never gave up painting. In 1977–1981 he studied again at an art academy, and among his teachers was the surrealist Melle Oldeboerrigter. Krabbé paints mainly landscapes, less often portraits and still lifes, often in bright colours, from an almost abstract manner to a figurative one, with a noticeable influence of Impressionism. He made studies wherever he was filming: in Ouarzazate in Morocco, in Vanuatu, in Indonesia. His work was shown by the Francis Kyle Gallery in London. In 2004 the book “Schilder”, a survey of his paintings, was published, and his paintings have appeared on Dutch postage stamps. He illustrated a cookbook by Marjan Berk and a collection of poems by J. H. van Geemert (1992).

In 2010 an exhibition of his, “De ondergang van Abraham Reiss” (The Fall of Abraham Reiss), with nine paintings about his grandfather, was held in Zwolle, and in 2022 it was published as a separate book together with a museum in Elburg and the Westerbork camp memorial centre.

From 2005 Krabbé presented documentary series on television about theatre and film, and since 2015 he has made the series “Krabbé zoekt…” (Krabbé Looks For…): on Van Gogh (2015), Picasso (2017), Gauguin (2018), Chagall (2020), Frida Kahlo (2022) and Matisse (2024).