THE MAN WHO LEAPED BEYOND THE ORDINARY
[IN MEMORIAM]
REMEMBERING THE LATE DEAN STOCKWELL, WHOSE PROLIFIC SEVEN-DECADE CAREER HAD FAR MORE TO IT THAN JUST QUANTUM LEAP
Which Dean Stockwell will you remember? For many people, it was all about Quantum Leap; his time-travelling hologram Al remains indelible. But the late actor’s career had more phases than the moon. As a cherub-faced child star of the ’40s, crumpling his features on cue — Elia Kazan told him to imagine dead puppies — he racked up the credits, including Kim alongside Erroll Flynn and Anchors Aweigh
with Frank Sinatra. As a scruffily handsome twentysomething of the ’50s, he was never quite a leading man, but beguiling in the Leopold and Loeb thriller Compulsion and Jack Cardiff’s Sons & Lovers.
The ’70s reduced him to bit parts, B-movies and Dennis Hopper’s Peruvian psych-out The Last Movie.
By the ’80s, he was a New Mexico realtor. That was, until David Lynch cast him as Dr Yueh in his lavishly potty Dune. At Harry Dean Stanton’s behest, he played the dependable brother in Paris, Texas. Stockwell described his approach as “totally intuitive” and directors tuned into his uncanny vibes: William Friedkin, Tony Scott, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola. And in 1988 he was Oscar-nominated for his womanising don in Jonathan Demme’s Married To The Mob.
The ’90s brought Quantum Leap,
and four steady, Emmy-nominated years. But there is no better image with which to bid farewell to the unclassifiable Mr Stockwell than his terrifying cameo in
Blue Velvet, miming Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ into a builder’s lamp, utterly lost to the surreal moment.
Now that is
unforgettable.