Familiar crag face was many characters
LOS ANGELES: Harry Dean Stanton, the craggyfaced character actor who for decades filled memorable and often eccentric roles including a prisoner in Cool Hand Luke and the creepy polygamist prophet on Big Love, has died of natural causes, aged 91.
He was a favourite of directors over the years with his gift for portraying offbeat and colourful characters. At the time of his death, he was completing
Lucky, a film that parallels Stanton’s own life.
Born in Kentucky, Stanton headed west after serving in the Navy during World War 2 and broke into acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.
His career, and his credits, were sweeping: The Godfather: Part II, Alien, Escape from New York, Paris, Texas, Pretty in Pink, Repo Man.
Stanton had a fondness for David Lynch, and Lynch had a fondness for him. He was cast as the illfated private detective in
Wild at Heart and had roles in
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
and the recent reboot of Twin
Peaks: The Return.
He turned down a role in Blue
Velvet, however, a part later given to Dennis Hopper.
Reuters said Stanton appeared in 70 movies and many television shows. In a career spanning 60 years, his roles were not always big but were meaningful and could add a special quirk or flavour to a film.
Sometimes he said very little in his roles, but with a long, craggy face highlighted by unkempt hair and sad, droopy eyes, Stanton had a strong physical presence and made a point of not overacting.
‘‘He’s one of those actors who knows that his face is the story,’’ his friend Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor, said in the 2012 documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction. Shepard died in July this year, aged 73.
Stanton credited Jack Nicholson with giving him vital professional advice. Nicholson had written a part for Stanton in the Western Ride the Whirlwind and told him to: ‘‘Let the wardrobe do the acting and just play yourself.
‘‘After Jack said that, my whole approach to acting opened up,’’ Stanton told
Entertainment Weekly.
Stanton worked with many of Hollywood’s most notable directors, including Frances Ford Coppola (The Godfather
Part Two and One From the
Heart), Sam Peckinpah (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), Martin
Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ), Ridley Scott (Alien), and
Lynch (Wild at Heart, The Straight Story, and Inland Empire.).
Stanton was born July 14,
1926, in West Irvine, Kentucky, to a tobacco farmer father and hairdresser mother who divorced when he was a teenager.
Stanton, who was a cook at the battle of Okinawa during his United States Navy service in World War 2, became interested in acting while attending the University of Kentucky and pursued acting at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse in California.
Stanton made a second career of music, playing regularly in Los Angeles and sometimes touring with the Harry Dean Stanton Band, in which he sang and played guitar and harmonica.
Stanton was never married, though he had a long relationship with Rebecca De Mornay.
‘‘I might have had two or three [kids] out of marriage,’’ he once told Associated Press. ‘‘But that’s another story.’’ — Los
Angeles Times/Reuters