Harry Dean Stanton
Actor and musician who specialised in playing losers, drifters, con men and lonely outsiders
HARRY DEAN STANTON, who has died aged 91, was one of Hollywood’s most eminent character actors. Stanton’s weathered features and hooded eyes formed the very model of the “lived-in” face, to the extent that he could make actually acting a part seem almost superfluous. His great strength on screen was his ability to transmit stillness and silence, a quality notable in what is probably his most famous role, that of Travis Henderson in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984).
Paris, Texas won the Palme d’or at Cannes and Stanton excelled as the silent, rootless wanderer Travis in the bleak Texan landscape attempting to reconnect with his brother, young son and, later, his wife (Nastassja Kinski). “After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play,” Stanton said. “If I never did another film I’d be happy.”
Stanton also had top billing in Alex Cox’s unconventional and humorous sci-fi movie Repo Man (1984), in which he co-starred with Emilio Estevez as the eccentric car repossessor, Bud, who is addicted to amphetamines and lives by the “repo code”.
“The movie,” wrote the critic Roger Ebert, “has a special way of looking at Los Angeles, seeing it through Harry Dean Stanton’s eyes as a wasteland of human ambitions where a few bucks can be made by the quick, the bitter, and the sly.”
In the romantic teen comedy Pretty
in Pink (1986) he played Molly Ringwold’s unemployed deadbeat father (when she wakes him in the morning his first words are: “Where am I?”). In close to 200 films he tended to play losers, grifters, con men or lonely outsiders. But if he never became a star of the magnitude of his friend Jack Nicholson, he claimed not to care: “If I like the role,” he once said, “I’ll just do it. I don’t care how small it is. There are no small parts. You know that old saying, right? There are only small actors.” In 1986, at the height of his success, he observed: “I would’ve preferred to blossom earlier in life. But after so many years, well, I wondered whether I had the presence, the ability and the sexuality to carry it off.”
Harry Dean Stanton was born in Kentucky on July 14 1926, the eldest of three sons of a tobacco farmer who doubled as a barber. When he was at high school his parents (strict Baptists) divorced, and his mother remarried. The young Stanton joined the US Navy, and in 1945 was serving as a cook in an ammunition ship during the battle of Okinawa when she was attacked by Japanese kamikaze pilots. He emerged unscathed.
After the war, at the University of Kentucky, he toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, but dropped out and took a Greyhound bus to California, where he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. His professional career began with appearances in popular Western series such as
Laramie, Rawhide and Bonanza, and in 1958 he secured his first significant film role, in The Proud Rebel (also a Western), starring Alan Ladd and Olivia de Havilland.
From then on Stanton was almost never out of work. For a couple of years in the 1960s he shared a house with Jack Nicholson in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, and in 1967 he played a memorable guitar-strumming convict in Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman. He enhanced his reputation with roles in such films as Monte Hellman’s road movie Two-lane
Blacktop (1971); Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (1973), directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan; John Milius’s gangster movie Dillinger (also 1973); Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather, Part II (1974); and The Missouri Breaks (1976), a Western starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson.
Stanton was the engineering technician Brett in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and played Asa Hawks for John Huston in Wise Blood (also 1979). In 1988 Martin Scorsese cast him as Saul (St Paul) in his controversial epic The
Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Wild at Heart (1990), a thriller in which he plays a private eye, was among a number of Stanton’s collaborations with the director David Lynch.
In the mid-1980s Stanton embarked on a parallel career as a musician, touring the United States with a band in which he sang and played guitar and harmonica. For Paris, Texas, he sang the Spanish ballad Cancion Mixteca.
The musicians he admired included Kris Kristofferson, JJ Cale, Leadbelly, BB King, Ray Charles, the Doors, the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas. He detested disco and heavy metal: “I refer to that stuff as cocaine music because it has no heart, and the fact that it’s popular is a reflection of the lack of humanity so prevalent in this country right now.” He described punk as “more a social phenomenon than a style of music”.
Stanton lived in a modest house in the Hollywood Hills. He was a keen student of eastern religions. “I can’t relate to the Judaic-christian concept at all,” he said. “It’s a fascistic concept. All fear-based. All about there being a boss. Someone in charge.” He was convinced that Jesus was a Buddhist: “The Jewish hierarchy, and certainly the Romans, didn’t want any part of that, because that would blow their whole trip.”
Stanton’s other films included Kelly’s Heroes (1970); Farewell My Lovely (1975); Straight Time (1978); Private Benjamin (1980); Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). He continued to work up until shortly before his death, and from 2006 to 2011 appeared in the HBO series Big Love, playing a self-styled Mormon prophet. In 2012 he had a cameo role in The Avengers, and he also appeared in the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film The Last Stand (2013).
His final television appearance was in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) in which he revived his character Carl Rodd from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. By now aged 90, he appeared craggy and bent, yet still retained the edginess of his younger days, although somewhat softened by old age. In his final film, Lucky, which is due for release later this year, he played a 90-year-old atheist on a spiritual journey.
He was the subject of a 2013 documentary, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, directed by Sophie Huber.
Harry Dean Stanton was unmarried, but fathered two children. A relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay ended when she ditched him for Tom Cruise. “I don’t feel rooted anywhere,” Stanton once said. “I feel very nomadic, like a warrior or a hunter. It’s always been a big conflict for me to settle down and have a family or put down roots.”