Kier and German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder had previously been teenage lovers and street hustlers in the Frankfurt gay scene in the early 1960s. Beginning in the late 1970s, Kier was cast in a number of Fassbinder features. It was a period in which Kier was also living in Fassbinder’s Munich household, running the kitchen. He played the hairdresser with whom the station master’s wife had an ongoing affair in “Bolwieser/The Stationmasters’ Wife” (1978) and was one of the terrorists in the black comedy “Die Dritte Generation/The Third Generation” (1979). Kier had small roles in the episodic masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) which was originally made for German television, as well as parts in “Lola,” and “Lili Marlene” (both 1981), the latter being one of Fassbinder’s takes on life in Nazi Germany.