A brilliant, original, immensely creative, much admired actor and filmmaker. Physically, a very attractive man, even at the very end. And as a human being, not the easiest to get along with.
But now he has died at the age of 74 as the result of prostate cancer — a particularly deadly form of cancer that has killed, to name just a few just in that relatively small group of men whose names are known to everyone, Telly Savalas, Dan Fogelberg, Merv Griffin, Frank Zappa, Johnny Ramone, and Bill Bixby (well, probably very few people under the age of 50 have heard of Bill Bixby, but I loved him in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father). I found out in researching this that a long list of other male celebrities have battled, and survived, prostate cancer — including Nelson Mandela, Rudy Giuliani, Harry Belafonte, Robert DeNiro, Bob Dole, Colin Powell, and John Kerry.
I was not a particular fan of Dennis Hopper’s (meaning, I had no animus toward him as an actor — just was not drawn to the kinds of roles he played). I did see Easy Rider in 1969, although I don’t remember anything about it except that it involved motorcycles, cross-country trips, and male bonding.
So there you go, I’m the perfect person to do a roundup of articles about Hopper’s passing!
Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly calls Hopper “the most visionary of all Hollywood bad boys.” Anyone with an appreciation for Dennis Hopper, or just an appreciation for good writing (like me), should read this piece in full.
Like a handful of other legendary artists (Carole King comes to mind here), Hopper was lucky enough to be around at a particular defining cultural moment, and was also sufficiently tuned in to that “zeitgeist” to seize the opportunities it offered:
Hopper may have had the surest hand on the zeitgeist of anyone in Hollywood, putting his fingerprints on a series of iconic, era-defining pictures. He played a supporting role in the ultimate ’50s teen drama, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); legitimized hippies on film (and in Hollywood’s power structure) with Easy Rider (1969); contributed a memorable cameo as a crazed journalist to Francis Ford Coppola’s New Hollywood apotheosis Apocalypse Now (1979); concocted one of the scariest of all screen villains as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986); directed the gang drama Colors (1988) with its hit title track by Ice-T just as L.A.’s Bloods and Crips were making news; and completely stole the blockbuster Speed (1994) as the bad guy. Later in life he became a widely exhibited photographer and published collections of his images.
Richard Stayton recalls the “tortured” relationship he developed with Hopper over a decade spent trying to work with him on a biography that he asked Stayton to write (the biography never came to fruition):
I wonder if Hopper saw his exit as a last movie? Or a final chance to play the lead in a Shakespeare tragedy? Or, perhaps, while dying he looked up at a teddy bear on a shelf — the one handmade by his mother. The mother he had violent sex fantasies about, “though I never acted on them,” he told me back in 1985.
That was the year I began to notice a ghostly figure nervously hovering at Westside art openings. It was difficult to recognize the manic performer I’d admired in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and Wim Wenders’ “The American Friend.” That outrageous hipster of “Easy Rider”? Nowhere to be found in this anxious loser.
I soon discovered that the gallery crasher was Hopper, that he’d fled his Taos, N.M., home of more than a decade, attended a minimum of three Alcoholics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings a day, and narrowly escaped being institutionalized while straitjacketed in a psychiatric ward. And he was broke — at that time, Hollywood considered him unemployable.
Seemed like a potential story for my then-employer, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner daily newspaper.
Upon visiting Hopper for that story: “Uh, like, man, sorry, you gotta come in through the garage.” His limp handshake trembled. His paranoid eyes avoided mine. A washer and dryer stood at the foot of the stairs to his Venice studio. Hopper stooped to ponder the dryer’s crammed contents. “Know anything about these things?”
“Not much.” I felt his laundry: wet. “Check the lint trap?”
“Lint trap? What’s a lint trap?”
“It allows hot air to circulate.” The lint trap wouldn’t budge. I pried at its edge with my keys until the trap cracked loose. I scraped out the crusted lint.
“Wow, man,” Hopper gasped. “Thanks so much, man.”
Thus began a tortured, 10-year relationship. My resulting Herald story about a rehabilitated Dennis Hopper was reprinted globally, perhaps because of the wild and crazy quotes: “I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic, I just drank all day long…. It wasn’t my liver, my kidneys and all that stuff that went. It was my mind.”
In gratitude for resurrecting his career and because, he said, I knew the art world, Hopper asked me to collaborate on his biography. We hung out together while my tape recorder consumed cassette after cassette of Dennis Hopper stories. He wanted the opening chapter to re-create his defiant confrontation with Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, who’d dared to mock Hopper’s Shakespeare background.
[…]
While we worked on the biography, Hollywood rediscovered a born-again actor. One profoundly grateful to be welcomed back. Although he would act crazier and astutely risk more than just about any performer — his managers warned that “Blue Velvet” was “irredeemable,” called “River’s Edge” “a career killer” — he no longer could risk excessive behavior. He rarely laughed, and cautiously measured every move. He worried that one false step might plunge him back into the hell of his 1970s decade.
Indie Wire has a good roundup of articles and clips.
For more reaction from a variety of weblogs to Hopper’s death GO HERE.
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