InMemory
The actor most recently appeared in Twin Peaks: The Return and can next be seen in Lucky, opening September 29.
Harry Dean Stanton was the king of the character actors. You may not have known his name, but you knew his hangdog face, with its deep-set eyes. For six decades, he was a stalwart of TV and films, racking up about 200 credits and bringing his ornery authenticity to landmark projects fromCool Hand LuketoThe Godfather Part IItoAlientoThe Last Temptation of ChristtoThe Avengers. He remained a vigorous presence on screen until his death of natural causes on September 15 in Los Angeles at age 91.
Stanton was born on July 14, 1926, in West Irvine, Kentucky. After serving in the Navy during World War II and earning a commendation for coolness under fire, Stanton took to the performing arts at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. Drifting among music, journalism, radio and the stage, he decided to become an actor because, “I thought, if I’m an actor, I can do all of it.”
And indeed he did. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse in the late 1940s and tried to break into Hollywood. After a decade of playing mostly thugs and desperadoes in movies and TV (starting with an uncredited role as a prison employee in Alfred Hitchcock’sThe Wrong Manin 1955), he started to become a face to watch for. He was the guitar-wielding convict who sings “The Midnight Special” inCool Hand Luke, a hitchhiker in Monte Hellman’s cult classicTwo-Lane Blacktop,an FBI agent inFrancis Ford Coppola’sGodfather II, the leader of a gang of horse rustlers in Arthur Penn’sThe Missouri Breaks, the ill-fated mechanic Brett inRidley Scott’sAlien, mountebank preacher Asa Hawks in John Huston’sWise Blood, the Army recruiter who paints an overly rosy picture of military life forGoldie HawninPrivate Benjamin, the informant nicknamed “Brain” inJohn Carpenter’sEscape From New York, the harmonica-playing patriarch in Robert Altman’sFool for Love,Molly Ringwald’sself-pitying dad inPretty in Pink, Paul inMartin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, the death-row prison trusty inThe Green Mile, and a security guard inThe Avengers.
Stanton’s crowning moment came with his lead role inWim Wenders’ 1984 dramaParis, Texas, playing an archetypal American loner named Travis, a part for which he was handpicked by screenwriter Sam Shepard. The movie opens with Stanton walking out of the desert, silent for 20 minutes, as if the elements had sandblasted his soul clean. The drama is all in his haunted eyes and ragged face. Travis spends the rest of the film trying to reconnect with his estranged family, but he’s practically an alien visitor from another time, another world. The film won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and revitalized Stanton’s career.
– Courtesy: Vanity Fair