The supporting actor who stole every scene

Harry Dean Stanton was the consummate character actor. With a hangdog visage, down-home voice, and shambling style, Stanton spent some 30 years in supporting roles in movies and TV, playing losers, outcasts, eccentrics, and twobit crooks. He was a guitarstrumming convict in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, an FBI agent in 1974’s The Godfather: Part II, and a doomed, downtrodden spaceship engineer in 1979’s Alien. Stanton’s ability to craft textured performances from just a few lines of dialogue made him a cinephile favorite. But he didn’t become a genuine star until his late 50s, when he landed his first leading role, in 1984’s Paris, Texas, winning critical acclaim for his nearly wordless portrayal of a loner looking for his place in the world. “After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted,” Stanton said at the time. “If I never did another film after Paris, Texas, I’d be happy.” Born in the small town of West Irvine, Ky., Stanton headed west to study acting after serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, said the Los Angeles Times. The young actor toiled in obscurity through the late 1950s and 1960s, taking small roles in TV Westerns such as Bonanza, Rawhide, and Gunsmoke, as well as in films, including How the West Was Won. But “as Hollywood’s auteur-driven era of the 1970s took hold,” Stanton’s talent for playing world-weary antiheroes began to attract notice, with critic Roger Ebert observing that no movie featuring Stanton in a supporting role could be “altogether bad.” His cult status was confirmed in 1984, said The Times (U.K.), when Paris, Texas won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Stanton starred in the bizarre and beloved sci-fi movie Repo Man. “He was the subject of Debbie Harry’s 1989 hit ‘I Want That Man,’ which began, ‘I want to dance with Harry Dean...’” “Stanton remained busy to the end,” said The New York Times. He was praised for his turn as a corrupt polygamist in the HBO drama Big Love, had small roles in the 2012 movies The Avengers and Seven Psychopaths, and this year appeared in a few episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. “To put it mildly,” he once said of his acting career, “I was just a very late bloomer.”