Dennis Hopper, 74, Hollywood Rebel, DiesBy EDWARD WYATT
May 30, 2010
Dennis Hopper, who was part of a new generation of Hollywood rebels in portrayals of drug-addled misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” and then went on to great success as a prolific character actor, died on Saturday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 74.
The cause was complications from metastasized prostate cancer, according to a statement issued by Alex Hitz, a family friend.
Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.
Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use.
During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago.
Mr. Hopper was hospitalized in Los Angeles in January, at which time he also filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, with whom he had a young daughter. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing “irreconcilable differences” for the filing.
“I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends,” he said in the release.
Mr. Hopper first won praise in Hollywood as a teenager in 1955 for his portrayal of an epileptic on the NBC series “Medic” and for a small part in the film “Rebel Without a Cause,” which starred James Dean, who was a friend of his.
Mr. Hopper confirmed his status as a rising star as the son of a wealthy rancher and his wife, played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, in “Giant” (1956), the epic western with Dean.
In those years, he was linked romantically with Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.
Yet that success brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of “From Hell to Texas.”
The story has several versions; the most common is that his refusal to play a scene in the manner that the director requested resulted in Mr. Hopper’s stubbornly performing more than 80 takes before he finally followed orders.
Upon wrapping the scene, Mr. Hopper later recalled, Mr. Hathaway told him that his career in Hollywood was finished.
He soon left for New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg for several years, performed onstage and acted in more than 100 episodes of television shows.
It was not until after his marriage in 1961 to Brooke Hayward — who, as the daughter of Leland Hayward, a producer and agent, and Margaret Sullavan, the actress, was part of Hollywood royalty — that Mr. Hopper was regularly offered film roles again.
He wrangled small parts in big studio films like “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965) — directed by his former nemesis Henry Hathaway — as well as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Hang ’Em High” (1968).
And he grew close to his wife’s childhood friend Peter Fonda, who, with Mr. Hopper and a few others, began mulling over a film whose story line followed traditional western themes but substituted motorcycles for horses.
That film, “Easy Rider,” which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans.
It won the prize for best first film at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (though it faced only one competitor, as the critic Vincent Canby pointed out in a tepid 1969 review in The New York Times).
Mr. Hopper also shared an Oscar nomination for writing the film, while a nomination for best supporting actor went to a little-known Jack Nicholson.
“Easy Rider” introduced much of its audience, if not Mr. Hopper, to cocaine, and the film’s success accelerated a period of intense drug and alcohol use that Mr. Hopper later said nearly killed him and turned him into a professional pariah.
Given nearly $1 million by Universal for a follow-up project, he retreated with a cadre of hippies to Peru to shoot “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office.
Mr. Hopper edited the film while living at Los Gallos, a 22-room adobe house in Taos, N.M., that he rechristened the Mud Palace and envisioned as a counterculture Hollywood.
It was there that his drug-induced paranoia took full flower, including a period in which he posted armed guards on the roof.
“I was terribly naïve in those days,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.”
Mr. Hopper was seen mostly in small film parts until he returned to prominence with his performance in “Apocalypse Now” (1979).
In a 1993 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Hopper credited Marlon Brando, a star of the film, with the idea of having him portray a freewheeling photojournalist, rather than the smaller role of a C.I.A. officer, in which he was originally cast.
But Mr. Hopper’s after-hours style continued to affect his work; in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines.
After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day.
He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in “Hoosiers” (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like “Blue Velvet” (also in 1986), “Speed” (1994) and “Waterworld” (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series “24” (2002).
Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.
Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.
His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.
He also built an extensive collection of works by artists he knew, including Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel.
Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., and raised on a nearby farm, Dennis Lee Hopper moved with his family to San Diego in the late 1940s.
He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles.
Mr. Hopper’s five marriages included one of eight days in 1970 to the singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. He is survived by four children, all of the Los Angeles area: Marin Hopper; Ruthanna Hopper, his daughter by Daria Halprin, his third wife; a son, Henry Lee Hopper, whose mother is Katherine LaNasa; and Galen, his daughter by Ms. Duffy.
On March 26, surrounded by friends like Mr. Nicholson and David Lynch, the director of “Blue Velvet,” Mr. Hopper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Looking frail, he began his brief acceptance speech by sardonically thanking the paparazzi for supposedly distracting him and causing him to lose his balance and fall the day before. He continued, “Everyone here today that I’ve invited — and obviously some that I haven’t invited — have enriched my life tremendously.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30hopper.html
Dennis Hopper: In memoryBy Roger Ebert
Dennis Hopper's career began as an actor of alienation in movies like "Rebel Without a Cause." His career as a director began with "Easy Rider." His career as an art collector began went he bought one of Andy Warhol's soup can paintings for $75. His career as a drug abuser began at around the same time, and he told me, simply and factually, "I spent some time in a rubber room."
Then he got clean and sober, and his careers started all over again, as an actor, as a director, as a photographer much in demand, as a painter, as an icon. Hopper's death came Saturday at age 74, surrounded by family and friends in the modernist house he built on Venice Beach in Los Angeles and filled with modern art.
For Hopper, life was an art form. His acting took such shape because he was able to reinvent himself as a character. More than many actors , he created characters we remember vividly for themselves: James Dean's sidekick in "Rebel," Marlon Brando's drug-crazed acolyte in "Apocalypse Now," the terrifying gas-sniffing pervert of "Blue Velvet," the town drunk in "Hoosiers," a hit man in "Red Rock West," the villain in "Waterworld."
He was also an intellectual, although that side was masked by his somewhat notorious drug abuse, gradually escalating from the 1960s until about 1983. Some of those years were lost.
"I was thinking I had no life or any memory really until now," he told me one day in 1990. "There's always this fear of not being able to make the films, not being able to do the work. I don't think anybody, no matter how successful they get, ever loses that fear. If you've ever had a period of time, where you weren't allowed to work--maybe because you were doing drugs and alcohol, but you didn't know that was their reason--then the fear is always with you."
He was an honor student in school, he developed an early love of Shakespeare, he studied under Thomas Hart Benton as a child, he studied Method acting with Lee Strasberg, his photographs commanded gallery prices, and as an art collector he was early onto Pop Art and his collection became famous and influential.
As a director, he practiced a classic style. "I'm back with John Ford and Huston and Hawks--and Hathaway," he told me. "I learned a lot from Henry Hathaway when I was acting in 'The Sons of Katie Elder'." That would have been gratifying for Hathaway to hear; Wikipedia reports that on "From Hell to Texas" he refused Hathaway's instructions for 80 different takes over few days.
The turning point of his professional career came when he directed "Easy Rider" (1969) and starred in it with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson; it was the movie that lifted his close friend Nicholson from obscure B movies into a stardom that lasts to this day. "We left America with a little motorcycle picture," he recalled, "we took it to the Cannes Film Festival, and we came back with a hit in our hands." The picture won the festival's Camera d'Or award, for best first film. "All of a sudden I was an auteur," he said.
The film cost $400,000 and grossed $60 million (in 1970s dollars) in its first three years in release. When I was writing a screenplay at 20th Century-Fox at the time, a producer moaned to me: "We're making these war movies and Westerns, and every producer in town has his nephew out in the desert shooting a motorcycle picture."
Dennis Hopper had no affectations. He was friendly, accessible, easy to talk with. He'd had great success without the affliction of great stardom. He was only 18 when he was signed by Warner Bros, 19 when he made "Rebel Without a Cause" (1956), and in those days when Hollywood was a studio town, he made friends and found work quickly, especially in countless episodes of TV dramas. Among his pals as a young man was John Wayne; they had their Republican politics in common.
At the end it was widely reported that he was broke, but in part that was because of a deathbed dispute with his wife, Victoria Duffy, about the disposition of his art collection. Visibly ill, he made one of his last appearances on March 26 at the dedication of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Describing himself as "a farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas" as he accepted his star, he said "Hollywood was my college."
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100529/FEATURED/100529969
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