The reluctant actor who shone in cult movies
Dean Stockwell 1936–2021
Dean Stockwell traveled an unlikely career path. A child star who appeared in Hollywood hits such as Anchors Aweigh (1945) and The Boy With Green Hair (1948), he became a brooding leading man in his 20s and an offbeat character actor in his late 40s, playing a menacing drug dealer who lip-syncs to Roy Orbison in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), a lecherous mafioso in Married to the Mob (1988), and the cigar-chomping, wisecracking Adm. Al Calavicci in the hit sci-fi TV series Quantum Leap (1989– 1993). Along the way, Stockwell took numerous detours from acting, including stints as an itinerant odd-jobber, a free-loving hippie, and a real estate agent in Santa Fe. “I never really wanted to be an actor,” he said. But “I came back each time because I had no other training.”
“Stockwell was very much a child of Hollywood,” said the Los Angeles Times. His actor parents “pushed him into theater at age 7,” and two years later he signed as a contract player at MGM. Stockwell appeared on screen with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Errol Flynn but found life as a child actor miserable. He quit the movies at 16 and spent years living “a hobolike existence, working in railroad gangs and picking fruit,” said The Times (U.K.). When he returned to Hollywood at age 21, the “curly-haired cherub had turned into a dark, intense, and charismatic leading man” who drew notice for roles in Sons and Lovers (1960) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962). Then in the mid 1960s “he dropped out for a second time,” moving to the countercultural hot spot Topanga Canyon, where he got “to live the carefree childhood that he had been denied.”
He came back to acting in the 1970s, but “struggled to land roles, appearing in fringe films and performing in dinner theater,” said The New York Times. Stockwell quit once more and moved to New Mexico, but a phone call from actor Harry Dean Stanton led to his appearance in director Wim Wenders’ 1984 cult road movie Paris, Texas. This comeback “would be his most successful, beginning a decade of his most critically acclaimed work.” Stockwell shrugged at his career’s up, down, and sideways movements. “I just take it as it comes,” he said. “One minute you’re nothing, and the next minute everything’s going for you.”