Dennis Hopper was a man of many talents: Easy Rider, photographer, director, trigger happy hippie, visual artist and one of the most intense actors of his generation.
“My life was pretty okay. It would have been easier though, if there hadn’t been this ceaseless desire to be creative – and the insecurity about getting the chance to verify it," reminisced Dennis Hopper, who died in Los Angeles on Saturday following a battle with cancer.
“Be creative or die!” was indeed a lifelong motto of the driven artist, a prometheus who burned his fingers more than once in the flame he carried through life, and which he passed on to many younger artists.
Dennis Hopper, born May 17,1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, grew up on his grandparents’ farm. Still in his teens, he swapped the monotonous open landscape of the Midwest with the breathtaking coastlines of California, where he began to study acting and landed his first film roles in the James Dean vehicles Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Giant (1956).
Dean, laid back and visceral in his approach to acting, made a lasting impression on the hot-blooded, earnest Hopper. Together with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood, they tested fast cars, motorcycles and inebriating substances. Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that Hopper and Dean became close friends – an impossibilty considering the latter’s evasive, haunted personality.
After Dean’s fatal car crash in 1955, Hopper moved on to playing small parts alongside Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne while studying drama at the Actor’s Studio. Due to his growing eccentricity he stayed without employment from 1960 to 1963. When the 60s counter culture was in full bloom, he connected to a growing fanbase in The Trip (1967) and Head (1968).
Dimension Films
As the sobering aftermath of the sombre seventies kicked in for the love generation, Hopper exiled himself from the world via booze and psychedelica, an unbefitting combination. He retreated to his editing studio in Taos, New Mexico, for months on end working on the footage of what was to become The Last Movie, shot in Peru throughout 1970.
The outcome was a surrealistic puzzle, resembling his private life at the time: in November of the same year his second marriage to The Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips went to pieces in only eight days. Hopper received treatment in a psychiatric institution and went on to play in low budget productions and various European art films (i.e. Wim Wender’s Ripley’s Game in 1974).
Politically he switched sides and became somewhat conservative, artistically he cultivated the financially lucrative maniac: the acid-fuelled journalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and the non-stop cursing, amyl nitrate-inhaling gangster Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986 (iconic line: “Mommy, Mommy, baby wants to f**k!”). In the same year he was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his role in Hoosiers.
In 1988 Hopper directed Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in the much praised Colors, went on to direct (and play in) Catchfire with Jodie Foster in 1989, and The Hot Spot with Don Johnson (1990) – a crime story still memorable for its soundtrack by Jack Nitzsche, featuring Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker. Appearances as an actor in successful 90s movies included Super Mario Bros (1993), Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995).
A special gem in the craft of movie acting is Dennis Hopper’s scene with Christopher Walken in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993), in which Walken’s mafia hitman tries brutally but vainly to extract information from Hopper’s retired cop.
Hopper’s last movie projects were Land of the Dead, Elegy, Palermo Shooting, a self ironic appearance as the suave biker Eddie Zero in Hell Ride and the voice of Tony in Alpha and Omega, an animated film about a pack of wolves, due to be released later this year. He also voice-overed and narrated documentaries about pop artist Andy Warhol, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and skater Chris Hosoi, as well as Gorillaz track Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head from 2005’s Demon Days album.
Hopper invested much of his income from Hollywood films into his vast art collection which he had started in the late 50s but which were lost in a domestic fire in 1961, together with his early output as a painter. In the last decade, Hopper's own abstract and hyper-realistic works have been shown in hundreds of exhibitions in the US, Europe and Japan. A retrospective, organised by painter and collegue Julian Schnabel, will open on July 11 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Of his five marriages he leaves behind an offspring of three daughters and two sons, the last of his frequently stormy relationships with Victoria Duffy took most of the energy still left from chemotherapy after he fell ill with prostate cancer in 2009. In March 2010, the 73-year-old actor, weighing only 100 pounds, received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame as he was congratulated by many friends and admirers such as Jack Nicholson, David Lynch and Viggo Mortensen.
Hopper also was a multiple presenter of the Taurus World Stunt Award. In 2004 he jumped out of an airplane and landed at the star-studded event. “If you are wondering why I am here,” Hopper told the audience. “So am I. They told me it was because of the stuff I did in the 60s and I thought, well, I laid down a bike in Easy Rider, but it wasn’t much of a stunt. Then they told me, ‘no, it was because of the stuff you did in your LIFE in the 60s!”
In an interview with German Art-Magazin in 2009, Dennis Hopper said of his life: “When I was young I was very naive about many things, about others, gladly, very stubborn. I might not have known in which direction I should run, but once I started, I was unstoppable.”
Clip from Easy Rider:
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