Actor spent years stealing scenes in cameo roles before big break
Harry Dean Stanton, actor: b West Irvine, Kentucky, July 14, 1926; d Los Angeles, September 15, 2017, aged 91.
One day in a bar in Santa Fe, in New Mexico, the playwright, screenwriter and actor Sam Shepard spotted the actor Harry Dean Stanton and they got to talking over tequilas. Although Stanton was laid-back and generally easygoing, he thought deeply about life and his place in the world.
And he had begun to wonder, with all the great reviews he had accumulated, why he never got to play the lead. ‘‘I was telling him I was sick of the roles I was playing,’’ Stanton later recalled. ‘‘I told him I wanted to play something of some beauty or sensitivity.’’
Stanton had been playing supporting roles for 30 years and he had been in some classic movies with some great actors. He was the singing convict Tramp in Cool Hand Luke (1967), he was an FBI agent in The Godfather Part II (1974) and he was the engineer Brett whose concern for the ship’s cat ends up with him falling victim to the monster in Alien (1979).
Off-screen Stanton was a friend of many of the biggest stars in Hollywood and the best man at one of Jack Nicholson’s weddings. But he had had enough.
Shepard had been discussing making a film with the celebrated German director Wim Wenders, who had said simply that he wanted to make a film about America. Various storylines had been discussed and discarded, but following the chance meeting between Shepard and Stanton it all came together with Paris, Texas (1984). It finally gave Stanton that elusive lead role – it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and made him a genuine star in his late fifties.
There is much of him in the character of Travis Henderson, the enigmatic loner who stumbles out of the desert one day and embarks on a journey looking for the family he walked out on years before, a man searching for his place in the world.
Travis is reunited with his son and, fleetingly, at the end of the film, with his wife. Wenders was concerned about the age difference between Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, who played his wife and was only 23. However, even that reflected Stanton’s own life, for he had only recently been in a relationship with Rebecca De Mornay, who was 33 years younger than him, although he never married.
‘‘I just wasn’t psychologically made to get married or, God forbid, be a father,’’ he told Entertainment Weekly a decade ago, although that did not mean that he did not have children. He had ‘‘one, maybe two’’, he said. ‘‘I talk with one of them every now and then.’’ On another occasion he said it may have been three children.
In a less hurried age of film storytelling, Stanton’s character in Paris, Texas says nothing for the opening 20 minutes, but his gaunt features and haunted eyes spoke volumes and cinema audiences could finally put a name to the long, soulful and doleful face with which they had become familiar in dozens of earlier movies.
‘‘I play myself as totally as I possibly can, my own Harry Dean Stanton act,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t know whatever happened to Travis. I’d say it’s me, still searching for liberation, or enlightenment, for lack of a better way to put it, and realising that it might happen, it might not.’’
Stanton also played the lead that year in Alex Cox’s bizarre, low-budget science-fiction movie Repo Man, which acquired a cult status. So Stanton was suddenly and belatedly a star and something of a cult figure. He was the subject of Debbie Harry’s 1989 hit I Want That Man, which began ‘‘I want to dance with Harry Dean ... ‘‘
He never became part of the Hollywood establishment, however. By his own admission he drank heavily and missed vital meetings that might have led to bigger things.
Soon he was back in character roles, but there was never any shortage of them and he continued working long after most people retire, with a regular role in the new series of Twin Peaks, the latest in a series of projects with director David Lynch.
"I had to decide if I wanted to be a singer or an actor. I thought if I could be an actor, I could do all of it."
Stanton was born in Kentucky in 1926. His father was a tobacco farmer and his mother a cook. They were Baptists and he sang from infancy, not only hymns but also other types of songs as well. ‘‘My sister tells me I began singing before I could even talk,’’ he said. ‘‘I was singing the blues when I was six. Kind of sad.’’
He served in the US Navy towards the end of World War II and was at the Battle of Okinawa. Back in Kentucky he went to university to study journalism and radio and played Alfred Doolittle in a student production of Pygmalion, after which he decided that he would attempt to pursue a career as a professional actor. He dropped out and headed for California and the famous Pasadena Playhouse.
‘‘I had to decide if I wanted to be a singer or an actor,’’ he said. ‘‘I thought if I could be an actor, I could do all of it.’’ He began getting regular work in films and television in the second half of the 1950s, appearing with Alan Ladd and Olivia de Havilland in The Proud Rebel (1958). In his early days he was billed as Dean Stanton to avoid confusion with another actor called Harry Stanton.
He and Jack Nicholson were friends before either was famous. They lived together for a while and Nicholson wrote a part for Stanton in the 1966 western Ride in the Whirlwind. ‘‘Jack called me and said, ‘Harry, I’ve written this part for you, but I don’t want you to do anything. Let the wardrobe do the acting and just play yourself’.’’
‘‘I was the head of a gang, I had a patch over one eye and a derby hat and my name was Blind Dick Reilly. I saw that when playing a head of a gang or a threestar general or the head of a corporation, you don’t have to do anything. The thousands and thousands of people who watch it all know that I’m the head of a gang. I can be indecisive, I can make mistakes, but I’m still the head of a gang. So that just freed me.’’
Ride in the Whirlwind was one of seven films Stanton made with Nicholson, including the 1976 western The Missouri Breaks, which also starred Marlon Brando. Stanton and Brando became close friends. They suffered from insomnia and sometimes would spend sleepless hours on the telephone to each other quoting Shakespeare.
Stanton also got on well with Bob Dylan, with whom he appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). ‘‘We drove all the way from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Kansas City to see the singer Leon Russell,’’ he said. They also went jogging together, although neither gave the impression of being a runner. On one occasion they accidentally ran through a scene as it was being shot, reputedly prompting the famously unstable director Sam Peckinpah to throw a knife at Stanton. ‘‘As I recall, he pulled a gun on me, too,’’ said Stanton.
Another decade passed before Repo Man and Paris, Texas. Although Stanton slipped back into supporting roles after that, they were memorable ones. He maintained his profile with a younger generation of cinema-goers as the father of the characters played by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen in Red Dawn (1984) and of Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink (1986). He was Paul in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), he played a convict in The Green Mile (1999) and had a cameo as a guard in The Avengers (2012).
His continuing status is underscored by two documentaries about him in recent years. And since 2011 there has been an annual Harry Dean Stanton film festival in the city of Lexington in Kentucky, with a programme of his films and related events.
Latterly his home, or at least his base, was a cabin off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. One interviewer reported that it was very difficult to find, along a hidden driveway, down a steep hill and then at the top of rickety stairs where visitors were greeted with a sign that said: ‘‘Welcome UFOs and crews.’’
However, Stanton did not really regard it as home as such. ‘‘It’s always been a big conflict for me to settle down and have a family or put down roots. My body is my home. I’d rather spend my life searching. Settling down would be a death for me.’’Although he did once feel disappointed by a lack of lead roles, he eventually came to accept his place in the cinematic world.
Stanton, who studied eastern religion and philosophy, said: ‘‘In the end, you end up accepting everything in your life ... It’s all a movie anyway, the whole phantasmagoria, it’s all meaningless. There is no answer to any of it ultimately. There is only the moment. Be still and see what happens. All of this unfolds perfectly.’’