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“I never felt I played the great part,” Dennis Hopper once said. “I never felt that I directed the great movie. And I can't say that it's anybody's fault but my own.” A pretty harsh self-judgment, but whether one agrees or not, there’s no denying that Hopper, who died today after a long battle with prostate cancer at the age of 74, did some memorable work in his more than half a century behind and in front of the camera.
Born in Dodge City, Kansas (an appropriate birthplace for a genuine Hollywood outlaw), on May 17th, 1936, Hopper acted in a variety of television shows in the 1950s (in the course of his career, he appeared in an estimated 140-plus episodes of Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, The Big Valley, Combat!, and others) before moving to the big screen, where his first role came in Johnny Guitar (1954). That same decade, he appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, two landmark films starring the legendary James Dean, but Hopper made his biggest mark in 1969 with Easy Rider, which he co-wrote, directed, and starred in (with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson); that iconic movie, made for a relative pittance, was not only a big hit but hugely influential as well, opening the floodgates to a wave of other anti-establishment efforts.
Hopper’s career was uneven after Easy Rider; his next directorial effort, The Last Movie, was a stiff (more successful was the 1988 L.A. gang film Colors), but he made an indelible mark as an actor with roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and especially David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which Hopper’s Frank Booth was the epitome of bizarre menace. Equally colorful was Hopper’s off-screen life. He was married five times, including an eight-day union with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas (“the first seven were pretty good,” Hopper said), and his drug and alcohol intake was legendary and landed him in hot water more than a few times (“I should have been dead ten times over... It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around”). He was also an expert photographer and an unabashed Republican who voted for Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes, although he confessed to supporting Barack Obama in 2008. --Sam Graham
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