Harry Dean Stanton

Il leggendario attore moure a 91 anni

BIOGRAFÍAS

Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton

(1026 - 2017)

Harry Dean Stanton (July 14, 1926 – September 15, 2017) was an American actor, musician, and singer.

Stanton's career spanned more than sixty years, during which he appeared in the films Cool Hand Luke (1967), Kelly's Heroes(1970), Dillinger (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), Alien (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Christine (1983), Repo Man(1984), Paris, Texas (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Wild at Heart (1990), The Straight Story (1999), The Green Mile (1999), Alpha Dog (2006), Inland Empire (2006), Lucky (2017), and others.

Unhappy childhood

"My father and mother were not that compatible. She was the eldest of nine children and she just wanted to get out. I don't think they had a good wedding night, and I was the product of that. We weren't close. I think she resented me when I was a kid. She even told me once how she used to frighten me when I was in the cradle with a black sock."

Harry Dean Stanton

'Life? It's one big phantasmagoria'

"Harry is a walking contradiction," says Sophie Huber, who has known him for 20 years. "He has this pride in appearing to not have to work hard to be good. He definitely does not want to be seen to be trying. It's part of his whole Buddhist thing."

'Life? It's one big phantasmagoria'

Rebecca de Mornay

Rebecca De Mornay

“She left me for Tom Cruise”

Harry Dean Stanton

"You get older," he says finally. "In the end, you end up accepting everything in your life – suffering, horror, love, loss, hate – all of it. It's all a movie anyway."

'Life? It's one big phantasmagoria'

Harry Dean Stanton
Poster by T.A.

Harry Dean Stanton dies at 91

LOS ANGELES — Harry Dean Stanton, the shambling, craggy-face character actor with the deadpan voice who became a cult favorite through his memorable turns in “Paris, Texas,” ”Repo Man” and many other films and TV shows, died Friday at age 91.

Stanton died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his agent, John S. Kelly, told The Associated Press. Kelly gave no more details on the cause.

Never mistaken for a leading man, Stanton was an unforgettable presence to moviegoers, fellow actors and directors, who recognized that his quirky characterizations could lift even the most ordinary script. Roger Ebert once observed that no movie with Stanton in a supporting role “can be altogether bad.”

He was widely loved around Hollywood, a drinker and smoker and straight talker with a million stories who palled around with Jack Nicholson and Kris Kristofferson among others and was a hero to such younger stars and brothers-in-partying as Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. “I don’t act like their father, I act like their friend,” he once told New York magazine.

Nicholson so liked Stanton’s name that he would find a way to work his initials, HDS, into a camera shot.

Almost always cast as a crook, a codger, an eccentric or a loser, he appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows in a career dating to the mid-1950s. A cult-favorite since the ’70s with roles in “Cockfighter,” ”Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Cisco Pike,” his more famous credits ranged from the Oscar-winning epic “The Godfather Part II” to the sci-fi classic “Alien” to the teen flick “Pretty in Pink,” in which he played Molly Ringwald’s father. He also guest starred on such TV shows as “Laverne & Shirley,” ”Adam-12” and “Gunsmoke.” He had a cameo on “Two and a Half Men,” which featured “Pretty in Pink” star Jon Cryer, and appeared in such movies as “The Avengers” and “The Last Stand.”

While fringe roles and films were a specialty, he also ended up in the work of many of the 20th century’s master auteurs, even Alfred Hitchcock in the director’s serial TV show.

“I worked with the best directors,” Stanton told the AP in a 2013 interview, given while chain-smoking in pajamas and a robe. “Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great.”

He said he could have been a director himself but “it was too much work.”

Becoming famous later in life

Fitting for a character actor, he only became famous in late middle age. In Wim Wenders’ 1984 rural drama “Paris, Texas,” he earned acclaim for his subtle and affecting portrayal of a man so deeply haunted by something in his past that he abandons his young son and society to wander silently in the desert.

Wiry and sad, Stanton’s near-wordless performance is laced with moments of humor and poignancy. His heartbreakingly stoic delivery of a monologue of repentance to his wife, played by Nastassja Kinski, through a one-way mirror has become the defining moment in his career, in a role he said was his favorite.

“‘Paris, Texas’ gave me a chance to play compassion,” Stanton told an interviewer, “and I’m spelling that with a capital C.”

The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival and provided the actor with his first star billing, at age 58.

“Repo Man,” released that same year, became another signature film: Stanton starred as the world-weary boss of an auto repossession firm who instructs Estevez in the tricks of the hazardous trade.

His legend would only grow. By his mid-80s, the Lexington Film League in his native Kentucky had founded the Harry Dean Stanton Fest and filmmaker Sophie Huber had made the documentary “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” which included commentary from Wenders, Sam Shepard and Kristofferson.

More recently he reunited with director David Lynch on Showtime’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” where he reprised his role as the cranky trailer park owner Carl from “Fire Walk With Me.” He also stars with Lynch in the upcoming film “Lucky,” the directorial debut of actor John Carroll Lynch, which has been described as a love letter to Stanton’s life and career.

Last year, Lynch presented Stanton with the “Harry Dean Stanton Award” — the inaugural award from the Los Angeles video store Vidiots presented first to its namesake.

“As a person, Harry Dean is just so beautiful. He’s got this easygoing nature. It’s so great just to sit beside Harry Dean and observe,” Lynch said at the show. “He’s got a great inner peace. As a musician, he can sing so beautifully tears just flow out of your eyes. And as an actor, I think all actors will agree, no one gives a more honest, natural, truer performance than Harry Dean Stanton.”

Lynch also directed Stanton in “Wild at Heart” and “The Straight Story.”

Growing up in Kentucky

Stanton, who early in his career used the name Dean Stanton to avoid confusion with another actor, grew up in West Irvine, Kentucky and said he began singing when he was a year old.

Later, he used music as an escape from his parents’ quarreling and the sometimes brutal treatment he was subjected to by his father. As an adult, he fronted his own band for years, playing western, Mexican, rock and pop standards in small venues around Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. He also sang and played guitar and harmonica in impromptu sessions with friends, performed a song in “Paris, Texas” and once recorded a duet with Bob Dylan.

Stanton, who never lost his Kentucky accent, said his interest in movies was piqued as a child when he would walk out of every theater “thinking I was Humphrey Bogart.”

After Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, he spent three years at the University of Kentucky and appeared in several plays. Determined to make it in Hollywood, he picked tobacco to earn his fare west.

Three years at the Pasadena Playhouse prepared him for television and movies.

For decades, Stanton lived in a small, disheveled house overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and was a fixture at the West Hollywood landmark Dan Tana’s. He was attacked in his home in 1996 by two robbers who forced their way in, tied him up at gunpoint, beat him, ransacked the house and fled in his Lexus. He was not seriously hurt, and the two, who were captured, were sentenced to prison.

Stanton never married, although he had a long relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay, 35 years his junior. “She left me for Tom Cruise,” Stanton said often.

“I might have had two or three (kids) out of marriage,” he once recalled. “But that’s another story.”

REVIEW JOURNAL

Harry Dean Stanton obituary

Harry Dean Stanton, who has died aged 91, was a vintage performer, only reaching his full potential in his late 50s.

Ronald Bergan

Saturday 16 September 2017 01.18 BST

Billed as Dean Stanton throughout the 1950s and 60s, the narrow-faced, weather-beaten actor with the hangdog expression was probably the busiest actor of his generation. His distinctive features and style proved a godsend for casting directors in search of conmen, misfits, sleazeballs, losers and eccentrics.

In the first half of his career, Stanton made scores of television appearances, mainly westerns, and dozens of films, mostly in brief roles. His face but not his name gained recognition.

That is until he came into more focus in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a downtrodden engineer on the doomed spaceship. Then, in 1984, greatness was thrust upon him when he was given two of his rare leading roles, in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, which were, understandably, his own favourites. A few years later, he was celebrated by Debbie Harryin the 1989 Blondie hit I Want That Man.

Stanton was born in a small town in Kentucky, where his father, Sheridan Harry Stanton, was a tobacco farmer and barber, and his mother, Ersel, a hairdresser and cook. After leaving high school in 1944, he served in the US navy in the second world war, during which he saw action in Okinawa. He then returned to study journalism and radio at the University of Kentucky, where he became seriously interested in acting after playing Alfred Doolittle in a college production of Pygmalion.

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Harry Dean Stanton dies aged 91 – video obituary

He dropped out of university and headed for California and the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse, where he acted alongside Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. Four years later, Stanton, who was also an excellent singer, and played the harmonica, bass and guitar, toured the country with The American Male Chorus. In Cool Hand Luke (1967), Stanton got to sing Just a Closer Walk With Me, accompanying himself on the guitar. He also taught Paul Newman the song he sings, I Don’t Care if it Rains or Freezes, Long as I Got My Plastic Jesus.

After touring with the chorus and working in children’s theatre, Stanton headed back to California where he began to get work in films and TV. One of his earliest features was the western The Proud Rebel (1958), in which he played the first of many villains, in this instance, framing Alan Ladd for starting a brawl.

For most of the 60s, Stanton was a regular in TV horse operas like Laramie, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bonanza and Rawhide. In the cinema, he was noticed as an evil outlaw with an eyepatch in Monte Hellman’s cultish low-budget western Ride in the Whirlwind (1965), written and starring Jack Nicholson. (Stanton was best man at Nicholson’s marriage in 1962, and the pair lived together in Laurel Canyon after Nicholson’s divorce in 1968.)

Stanton’s film career really took off in the 70s, with two more roles for Hellman – Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and The Cockfighter (1974) – and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Stanton recalled that during the latter, he became friends with Bob Dylan. “We hung out quite a bit during the shoot,” he said. “Drove together all the way from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Kansas City together. We jammed together quite a bit.” Stanton sang with Dylan and Joan Baez in the sprawling film Dylan directed, Renaldo and Clara (1978).

He played an FBI man in The Godfather II (1974), supported Marlon Brando and Nicholson in The Missouri Breaks (1976), and was convincing in Straight Time (1978) as an ex-con, bored with his middle-class existence, who, while lying beside his pool, asks Dustin Hoffman, planning a heist, to “Get me out of here!”.

In 1979 came Alien and John Huston’s Wise Blood, with Stanton excellent as a fraudulent blind preacher in the latter. Stanton then proved his versatility in three comedies: as the smooth-talking recruiting sergeant in Private Benjamin (1980), who gets Goldie Hawn to sign up to the “new” army; as the pathetic chain-smoking dognapping vet in The Black Marble (1980), and announcing that “there are over 100 bodily fluids and I have tasted each and every one of them”, as a medic in Young Doctors in Love (1982).

Stanton’s off-kilter performance in Repo Man, passing on his philosophy of life to his protégé (Emilio Estevez), perfectly gelled with the sensibilities of the tale involving punk-rockers and creatures from another planet. In Paris, Texas, in a role written for him by Sam Shepard, he is first seen walking alone in the Texan desert and does not speak for the opening 20 minutes. Stanton’s attraction to eastern philosophy and spirituality may have helped his still, eloquent performance, brilliantly evoking an outsider, a voyeur of life. “I can’t relate to the Judaic-Christian concept at all,” he once claimed. “It’s a fascistic concept. All fear-based. All about there being a boss. Someone in charge. A creator.”

Stanton continued to reveal his more tender side with several gentle performances such as the guardian angel in One Magic Christmas (1985), as Molly Ringwald’s burnt-out father in Pretty in Pink (1986), and as a sweet-natured, but ill-fated, private investigator – “so clever he could find an honest man in Washington” – in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). Also for Lynch, he made a touching cameo appearance in A Straight Story (1999) and in the cryptic Inland Empire (2006), he makes the most of his short role as Jeremy Irons’s debauched and broke assistant.

Television offered him the chance to return to his villainous ways as a satanic church leader of a polygamous group in 39 episodes of Big Love (2006-2010). On the whole, the quality of his films declined, but Stanton could always be relied upon to hold audience’s attention, paradoxically, with his understated portrayals. “Usually, I just play myself,” Stanton explained. “Whatever psychological traumas or conflicts I’m going through at the time I try to put into the role. Sometimes it’s quite a feat to pull off, but sometimes it works.” His final film, Lucky, directed by John Carroll Lynch, is due for release at the end of September.

Apart from his busy film schedule, Stanton had a parallel career as a musician, on guitar and singing in The Harry Dean Stanton Band, which played their own mixture of mariachi and jazz. He lived alone in a house on LA’s Mulholland Drive, where his doormat read, “Welcome UFOs”. In 1996, he happened to be home when burglars struck, tied him up and pistol-whipped him before stealing some expensive electronics and taking off in his car. But they were soon apprehended after the car was traced by a tracking device. Stanton suffered only minor injuries. He rarely talked publicly about his private life but, though he never married, he once said he had “one or two children”.

Harry Dean Stanton, actor; born 14 July 1926; died 15 September 2017

THE GUARDIAN

"After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play," Stanton once said of that late breakthrough role. "If I never did another film after Paris, Texas I'd be happy."

Harry Dean Stanton / 'Life? It's one big phantasmagoria'

David Lynch on Harry Dean Stanton: "He Was a Great Actor and a Great Human Being"

Filmmaker David Lynch has paid tribute to his friend and frequent cast member Harry Dean Stanton, who died Friday at age 91.

“The great Harry Dean Stanton has left us,” Lynch wrote. “There went a great one. There’s nobody like Harry Dean. Everyone loved him. And with good reason. He was a great actor (actually beyond great) – and a great human being – so great to be around him!!! You are really going to be missed Harry Dean!!! Loads of love to you wherever you are now!!!”

Stanton was most recently on screen this summer in Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

Stanton appeared in Lynch’s 1990 film “Wild at Heart” and in 1992’s “Twin Peaks: A Fire Walk With Me,” although he was not in the original “Twin Peaks” series that aired from 1990-91 on ABC. Stanton also had role in Lynch’s 1999’s “The Straight Story” and 2006’s “Inland Empire.”

VARIETY

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Missouri Breaks (1976)
Straight Time (1978)
Alien (1979)
Wise Blood (1979)
Christine (1983)
Repo Man (1984)
Paris, Texas (1984)
Red Dawn (1984)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Wild at Heart (1990)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
The Green Mile (1999)
The Straight Story (1999)
Inland Empire (2006)
Rango (2011)
The Avengers (2012)
Lucky (2017)

WIKIPEDIA