Peter Greene, who played memorable villains in Nineties classics including Pulp Fiction and The Mask, has died at the age of 60.
The actor was found unresponsive in his New York apartment, his manager confirmed, with a cause of death to be determined. Police told the New York Post that no foul play is suspected.
Greene won the Best Actor prize at the 1994 Taormina International Film Festival for his star-making role in Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven, in which he played a man with schizophrenia. He later parlayed his success into villain roles in numerous films, including The Mask, where he played mafia kingpin Dorian Tyrell, and The Usual Suspects and Under Siege 2.
But it was Pulp Fiction that loomed largest, with Greene playing Zed in the 1994 Quentin Tarantino classic, a security guard who holds captive characters Butch and Marcellus, played by Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames. In one of the most disturbing scenes from Nineties cinema, Zed orders his accomplice – a masked sex slave known only as The Gimp – to watch over Butch while he rapes Marcellus.
After a violent confrontation, Butch steals Zed’s prized motorcycle and gives it to his girlfriend, telling her that “Zed’s dead, baby – Zed’s dead”.
In a rare interview in 2011, Greene admitted that he initially turned down the role due to its content. “When I got the script, I was thoroughly disappointed,” Greene said. “The way it was written wasn’t my cup of tea. If you ever saw Deliverance, you never saw the guy who took Ned Beatty and made him ‘squeal like a pig’ ever again, so I didn’t think it was a great career move.”
However, Tarantino kept pursuing him to take the role, and eventually allowed Greene to alter the scene to his preference. “We kept the language that was there, but it was originally a much more graphic scene.”
“He was a terrific guy,” Greene’s manager Gregg Edwards said in a statement. “Truly one of the great actors of our generation. His heart was as big as there was. I’m going to miss him. He was a great friend.”
Greene’s other credits include the action film Judgment Night, the Halle Berry thriller The Rich Man’s Wife and the Jennifer Aniston action comedy The Bounty Hunter.
