Actor Gunnar Hansen, best known for his playing the in-bred cannibal, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has died at age 68.
The Icelandic born American actor died on Saturday after suffering from pancreatic cancer.
According to his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, Hansen died at his home in Maine, where he lived for 40 years.
Hansen had moved to Maine from Reykjavik at the age of five with his family. They then re-located to Texas, where he attended high-school and university where he studied English and Scandinavian Studies.
He secured the part of Leatherface just after finishing graduate school, after he heard it was being filmed in Austin.
The cult horror film saw Hansen playing a murderous outcast, where he wore a gruesome mask made of human skin from his victim and weilded a chainsaw.
He once said in a TV interview that he is so unlike his Leatherface character, that when people who meet him and learn that he played the murderer, they often react it total shock.
The 1973 film was his first success, and led him to go on to play a plethora of roles in other horror based films up to 2013, with the 3D remake of the original called Texas Chainsaw 3D. The remake also included Marilyn Burns, another original cast member, who first played Sally Hardesty one of the victims.
He appeared in 28 films, worked as a magazine editor and wrote several screenplays, books and documentaries.
His other roles included Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers in 1988, a comedy horror, where he plays “The Master”. He played the role of bank-robbing Earl, in Mosquito, a science-fiction film that played homage to the 1950s horror with alien ships and giant mosquitos. He also played Daddy in Chainsaw Sally in 2004. Hansen again used a chainsaw in all of the above films.
He even played the role of the captain in an Icelandic film, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre in 2009.
After starring in the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, he later wrote a book, Chain Saw Confidential, detailing from behind the scenes how the film was made.
At his time of death, Hansen was working on a film called Death House, which he was writing and producing. It was scheduled to come out next year.
Hansen leaves behind him, his partner of 13 years Betty Tower.
