Madsen was born in Chicago to a family of three children.
He performed on stage with the city’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company alongside actors including John Malkovich.
During a handprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theatre in November 2020, Madsen reflected on his first visit to Hollywood in the early 1980s.
“I got out and I walked around and I looked and I wondered if there were someday some way that that was going to be a part of me. And I didn’t know because I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point with myself,” he said. “I could have been a bricklayer. I could have been an architect. I could have been a garbage man. I could have been nothing. But I got lucky. I got lucky as an actor.”
His first film role of any significance was in the 1983 hacker thriller WarGames with Matthew Broderick. The following year he played pro baseball player Bump Bailey alongside Robert Redford in The Natural.
He spent much of the rest of the 1980s doing one-off guest roles on television dramas including Miami Vice and Quantum Leap.
1991 would bring a career boost with roles in The Doors, where he played a buddy of Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison, and Thelma And Louise where he played the boyfriend of Susan Sarandon’s Louise.
Then would come Reservoir Dogs.
In 1995, he played a black ops mercenary in the sci-fi thriller Species and in 1997 he was third billed after Al Pacino and Johnny Depp as a member of a crew of gangsters in Donnie Brasco.
He occasionally played against type. In the 1993 family orca adventure Free Willy he was the foster father to the orphan protagonist.
Madsen would return to smaller roles but worked constantly in the final two decades of his career.
Madsen had six children. He had struggled in recent years after the 2022 death of one of his sons, Hudson.
“Losing a child is the hardest and most painful experience that can happen in this world,” Madsen said in an Instagram post last year.
He said the loss put a strain on his marriage to third wife, DeAnna Madsen. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery last year, but was not charged. He filed for divorce, but asked that the filing be dismissed just weeks later.
He had previously been arrested twice on suspicion of DUI, most recently in 2019, when he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor.
“In the last two years Michael Madsen has been doing some incredible work with independent film including upcoming feature films Resurrection Road, Concessions and Cookbook For Southern Housewives, and was really looking forward to this next chapter in his life,” his managers Smith and Susan Ferris and publicist Liz Rodriguez said in a statement. “Michael was also preparing to release a new book called Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts And Poems currently being edited.”
They added that he “was one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors, who will be missed by many”.
