Dennis Hopper:DENNIS HOPPER, who has died aged 74, was one of Hollywood's great modern outlaws. His persona, on and off the screen, signified the lost idealism of the 1960s. There were stages in Hopper's career when he was deemed unemployable because of his reputation as a hell-raiser and his substance abuse. However, he made spectacular comebacks and managed to kick his dependence on alcohol and cocaine.
Born in Dodge City, Kansas, Hopper, whose father was a post-office manager and mother a lifeguard instructor, expressed an interest in painting and acting at a young age. While still in his teens, he appeared in repertory at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and studied acting at the Old Globe theatre in San Diego.
The year of his 19th birthday, 1955, was extraordinary. Not only did Hopper have substantial parts in three television dramas, but he was cast in supporting roles in James Dean's last two films: Rebel Without a Causeand Giant. The two actors became friends over the few months before Dean, whom Hopper idolised, was killed in a car crash aged 24.
Hopper brought some moody method acting mannerisms to bear on his following roles, mostly as callow, trigger-happy villains in westerns.
In the 1960s, Hopper, who alienated several veteran directors and producers, was pronounced difficult, argumentative and violently temperamental. But he continued to get work, mostly in minor baddie roles in major films including Cool Hand Luke(1963), The Sons of Katie Elder(1965) and True Grit(1969).
He also turned up in the weird space vampire film Queen of Blood(1966). The executive producer on the film was Roger Corman, who had just begun his cycle of dope and biker movies, and cast Hopper with Peter Fonda in the seminal acid flick The Trip(1967). The duo together conceived, wrote with Terry Southern, raised the finance for, and starred in the alienated-youth road movie Easy Rider(1969), with Hopper directing.
The film’s combination of drugs, rock music, violence, a counterculture stance and motorcycles as the ultimate freedom machines caught the imagination of the young and made pop icons of Hopper and Fonda on their bikes. It also brought Hopper, Fonda and Southern a best screenplay Oscar nomination.
Hopper, meanwhile, was out of control. His eight-year marriage to Brooke Hayward, the daughter of actor Margaret Sullavan, had ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Michelle Phillips of the Mamas the Papas but it lasted eight days. In the same year, a raving, naked, drug-fuelled Hopper was arrested while running around Los Alamos, New Mexico.
In 1971, following the success of Easy Rider, Hopper was bankrolled by Universal and given total creative control to make whatever kind of movie he wished. He decamped to Peru with a cast and crew for a self-penned, directed and edited meta-monstrosity, The Last Movie(1971). The film, made for the stoned by the stoned, was stoned by the critics.
Before the film's limited release, Hopper wrote and appeared in an autobiographical documentary, The American Dreamer(1971), which showed him spouting hippy philosophy, taking baths with women and shooting guns. This sealed his reputation as the most flipped-out man in the movies, and he spent the next 15 years in foreign films, personal projects and low-budget arthouse or exploitation movies.
The quality of these veered wildly, but Hopper turned in one of his most memorable performances as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley character, who has the enigmatic, homicidal title role in Wim Wenders' The American Friend(1977). High on drugs, he improvised much of his part of the photojournalist buzzing around Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now(1979).
In 1983, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation programme. After emerging relatively clean, he played an alcoholic father in Coppola's Rumble Fish(1983), now a commanding elder statesman amid the brat-pack cast.
Hopper's comeback was consecrated in 1986 with his portrayal of a psychopathic kidnapper in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. This was followed with a touching performance as an ashamed dad seeking redemption in Hoosiers, for which he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar.
In Flashback(1990), as an erstwhile 1960s radical activist gone underground, Hopper seems to be playing his own legend, drawing inspiration from his earlier characters. This led to similarly offbeat performances, many of them variations on the smiling, charming, cold-blooded killer with a screw loose. He stood out in supporting roles in True Romance(1993) and the box-office smash Speed(1994).
In 2008, Hopper appeared in the TV series Crash, the spin-off from the 2004 Paul Haggis film, as a verbose, eccentric, down-on-his-luck music producer. Hopper proudly stated that it was the craziest character he had ever played.
Despite his radical persona, Hopper was a paid-up Republican, though he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. In that year, he appeared in An American Carol, a liberal-bashing comedy starring right-wing actors such as Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer and James Woods.
Hopper was an accomplished painter and sculptor. He was also a skilled photographer whose subjects included Martin Luther King; fellow artists Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg; and co-stars including Paul Newman and John Wayne.
He was married five times and is survived by four children.
Dennis Lee Hopper: born May 17th, 1936; died May 29th, 2010