[2 articles]
Iconoclastic actor Dennis Hopper dies
http://www.catholic.org/ae/movies/review.php?id=36766
By Greg Goodsell
6/1/2010
He began his acting career as a fresh-faced and wholesome male lead
in the exciting new medium of television. In the Sixties, he became a
hippie icon in his role as the outlaw biker Billy in "Easy Rider."
Once the drug euphoria of that era collapsed into darkness and abuse,
he chilled audiences as the personification of evil as Frank in "Blue
Velvet." Actor Dennis Hopper has died from prostate cancer. He was 74.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Beginning his career as a studio
contract player, Hopper would find himself usually cast as men on the
edge: villains, outcasts, anti-establishment types and lost souls. It
was often a case of art imitating life. Hopper fought the Hollywood
establishment by directing personal, non-commercial films such as
"The Last Movie" and "On the Edge."
A pivotal moment in Hopper's life was when he was cast alongside
legendary actor James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause" in 1955. The
two became friends, and Dean became a role model for the young Hopper.
Hopper also fought battles with substance abuse over the course of
his life. A penchant for drunken and scandalous behavior made the
actor synonymous as a "washed-up has-been" associated with along dead
era in American life.
"The alcohol was awful. I was a terrible alcoholic," Hopper told CBS'
Charlie Rose. "I mean, people used to ask how much drugs I did. I
said, 'I only do drugs so I can drink more.' I was doing the coke so
I could drink more. I mean, I don't know any other reason. I'd start
drinking in the morning. I'd drink all day long."
Hopper would regain fame with outstanding work in "Blue Velvet" and
"Hoosiers," for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1986.
Hopper's last public appearance was when he accepted his star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in March. He died surrounded by his children
and wife Victoria at his home in Venice, California. According to his
wishes, his remains will be interred in Taos, New Mexico.
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Dennis Hopper, director of "Easy Rider," dies
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/29/MN301BHOEL.DTL
Mick LaSalle
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Dennis Hopper, who directed and starred in the seminal
countercultural film "Easy Rider" and later established himself as a
highly distinct and flamboyant character actor, died Saturday at his
home in Venice (Los Angeles County) after battling prostate cancer. He was 74.
Over a prolific career with many ups and downs, marred at times by
drug use, Mr. Hopper, at his best, seemed a man in the grip of an
ecstatic vision that ultimately had nothing to do with chemicals or
substances. In his acting, he often reached beyond the pedestrian to
find the truth right at the edge of madness. He called life "this
miracle we all exist in" and his finest performances suggested an
affectionate respect for the various and telling ways people perceive reality.
It was a sensibility made for the director's chair, and it was as the
director of "Easy Rider" that Mr. Hopper became a major cultural
force. The episodic story of two hippies (he and Peter Fonda) making
their way across America on motorcycles, Mr. Hopper placed his hero's
quest for identity and fulfillment within the tradition of the road
stories of American literature, from Mark Twain through Jack Kerouac.
In "Easy Rider," the choice to become a hippie wasn't a passive one,
but something active and difficult, part of a rigorous pursuit of truth.
Mr. Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kan., a town made famous in movie
Westerns, but his first lucky break as an actor came at the age of
13, when his family got out of Dodge and moved to San Diego. There
Mr. Hopper began his acting training at San Diego's Old Globe
Theater. His studies later took him to Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio
in New York City, the era's most important training ground for young
actors, and in 1955, at the age of 19, he began a career in television.
Idolized James Dean
That same year, he got a role in his first feature film, "Rebel
Without a Cause" (1955), which put him in contact with James Dean. He
later appeared with Dean in the movie "Giant" (1956). Mr. Hopper
idolized Dean and was greatly affected by his death. "Dean was the
real father of the Beat Generation," he told me in 1996, "not
Kerouac, not Burroughs or Ginsberg. To me it was Dean."
In the 1950s and early '60s, Mr. Hopper pursued careers as a
television actor and photographer (some of his photographs were
subsequently exhibited in major museums). He made more than 100
small-screen appearances, as a guest star, then transitioned into
feature films, with appearances in "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) and "True
Grit" (1969). Then came "Easy Rider," which put Mr. Hopper on the map.
Noted art collector
His life and career deserve to be remembered as triumphant: He did
important, lasting work. He impressed his fun-loving, somewhat skewed
but good-natured personality upon the times. And he achieved note as
a collector and enthusiast for modern art. (He bought Andy Warhol's
painting of a Campbell's soup can before it was famous.) Yet his
career was full of many defeats, many of them self-inflicted, some
the result of bad luck.
In the 1970s, following the disastrous reception of his second film,
"The Last Movie" (1971), he found it impossible to get financing as a
director, and good roles were hard to come by. Drugs and alcohol were
a factor in his divorce from Michelle Phillips, to whom he was
married for only one week in 1970. He took parts in European
productions and stayed under the radar for most of the 1970s, before
resurfacing as a frenetic photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola's
"Apocalypse Now." The role was received by the public as a riff on
Mr. Hopper's notorious public persona.
But Mr. Hopper's second phase could not truly begin until he got
sober, which he did in 1983. Three years later, he made a memorable
appearance as the off-his-rocker villain, Frank Booth, in David
Lynch's "Blue Velvet" (1986). By now Mr. Hopper's legend and personal
history informed the public's response to him on screen and enriched
their understanding of the characters he played. His role in
"Hoosiers" as a well-meaning man struggling with alcoholism couldn't
have come at a better time, and his performance was met with a best
supporting actor Oscar nomination.
Era as a villain
With those two triumphs, Mr. Hopper was relaunched in this era as a
character actor, often as a villain - most memorably in "Red Rock
West" (1993), as a screaming, maniacal hit man with an inferiority
complex; and in "Speed" (1994), as a mad bomber - and less memorably
in "Super Mario Bros." (1993) and "Waterworld" (1995). Often his
particular dazzle was the only spark of life in forgotten thrillers,
such as "Boiling Point" (1993).
"A lot of the time, I'm trying to make gold out of s-," Mr. Hopper
said in 1996. "They're not great parts. I usually get them after
everybody else has turned them down. And I just hope to have enough
craft to make things work."
He made a vivid brief appearance in "True Romance" (1993), in which
he artfully avoids torture by enraging a Mafia henchman into killing
him. (He does this with pointed observations about the proximity of
Sicily and Africa.) But the best role of his career came in "Carried
Away" (1996), a film few people know, in which he played an aging
country schoolteacher who falls in love with a 17-year-old girl (Amy
Locane). Mr. Hopper could easily have been nominated for an Academy
Award for his performance, but Fine Line dumped the movie, despite
great reviews by Siskel & Ebert and by critics in New York, Los
Angeles and San Francisco.
Finest performance
"That's the best performance I've done," Mr. Hopper said. "That's the
first time I ever had something really good to play." He went on to
say that it was "very destructive" to his career, to have starred in
a movie that was never even distributed. His assessment may have been
accurate. After 1996, Mr. Hopper ceased to be a frequent supporting
player in mainstream films.
Over the years, he continued to pursue his career as a director, but
financing remained elusive. He had a hit with "Colors" (1988),
starring Sean Penn, and two years later directed "The Hot Spot"
(1990), a sexy thriller with Jennifer Connelly, Don Johnson and
Virginia Madsen, but that film, unaccountably, went nowhere. His last
film as a director was "Chasers" (1994), starring Tom Berenger. In
that 1996 interview, he told me of a script that he couldn't wait to
direct, but before I could begin to look forward to seeing it on
screen, he predicted (correctly, alas) that the project would go nowhere.
"You know, if you say, 'I found this script, I don't really like it,
it needs a rewrite,' you might get a deal," Hopper said. "But if you
come in and say you love it, they say, 'Uh-oh. He loves it.' "
He was a Republican
In recent years, Mr. Hopper starred in the TV show, "Crash," a
spin-off of the Oscar-winning film. He also became notable as one of
Hollywood's few Republicans, and along those lines, he appeared as
the Judge in "An American Carol" (2008) and as a kind of Walter
Mondale parody in the political satire, "Swing Vote" (2008). However,
in an election day 2008 appearance on "The View," Mr. Hopper
announced that he'd voted for Barack Obama. "I've been a Republican
since Reagan, and I stayed a long time," he said, "but (Sarah) Palin
finally sent me over the other side."
In person, Mr. Hopper was engaging and soft-spoken, disarmingly
honest and self-deprecating, prone to observations about art and
philosophical reflection, an amusing conversationalist with a smile
that enlisted his listeners in a sense of fun and complicity. His Los
Angeles home looked like a museum. He lived surrounded by art, with
works by Basquiat, Warhol, Schnabel and Duchamp.
5 wives, 4 children
Mr. Hopper was married five times and is survived by four children,
including a 6-year-old daughter, Galen, born to his fifth wife,
Victoria Duffy. He filed for divorce in January from Duffy after 14
years of marriage.
Dennis Hopper will be remembered for his affinity for rebellion, for
his celebration and embodiment of the independent spirit.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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E-mail Mick LaSalle at [email protected].
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