http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/obit/2010-05-29-dennis-hopper_N.htm
Life was rarely an easy ride for the veteran actor. Of course, there were some highs along the way for the actor and filmmaker. As buckskin-draped Billy and star-spangled Wyatt, he and Peter Fonda became hippie-era icons as stoner cowboys in search of America atop heavy-metal steeds in 1969's Easy Rider. The road-trip odyssey directed by Hopper, produced by Fonda and co-written by both was an Oscar-nominated classic of its kind, an independent production that cost less than $400,000 and sold uptight Hollywood on the benefits of exploiting youth culture and a new generation of filmmakers.
Even today, the shot of the two long-haired drifters astride their customized low-riding motorcycles is as identifiable as faces on Mount Rushmore.
But ever since a teenaged Hopper appeared in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause opposite mentor James Dean— who would die in a car crash at age 24 before their second film together, 1956's Giant, was even released — his journey often was a rough one, marked by self-destructive drama and blurred by excessive drugs and alcohol.
The prolific, influential yet reckless actor, who eventually pulled himself together to become an invaluable, oft-villainous screen presence in the second half of his career, died Saturday after battling prostate cancer.
Though shocking, it isn't too surprising that even from his sick bed, he was embroiled in a messy divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria, the source of his longest marriage at 14 years and mother of 6-year-old daughter Galen. He issued this statement about breaking up the union: "I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends."
Hopper had his share of good times, such as his supporting-actor Oscar nomination as a town drunk turned assistant basketball coach to Gene Hackman in 1986's Hoosiers that signaled his return to form.
But the lows could be positively hellish, such as Hopper's quickie marriage in 1970 to Michelle Phillips, an actress and a member of The Mamas & the Papas singing group. "The first seven were pretty good," he joked about the eight-day union. Meanwhile, she claimed he kept her in handcuffs and fired guns inside the house.
Most disastrous was his directorial follow-up to Easy Rider, 1971's The Last Movie, a crazily incoherent commentary on filmmaking shot in the Peruvian jungle. No studio would allow him behind a camera again for another 16 years with the hard-hitting gang-war drama Colors starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.
Hopper eventually received a hallucinogenic wakeup call in 1983 when he had to be institutionalized after being found wandering naked on a Mexican highway with visions of space ships and World War II spinning in his head. The bizarre incident would lead to a stint in rehab and a chance at career revival.
Once redeemed, the actor proved himself to be a true pro right to the end. He even finished work on the second season of Crash, the cable TV series based on the 2004 Oscar-winning drama, before seeking experimental treatment for the disease, a diagnosis that was made public in October.
As if making up for any lost time, Hopper rarely turned down work. Even at his most wasted, he would scrounge up jobs in Europe. He wasn't above such roles as reptilian bad guy King Koopa in the inane 1993 video-game adventure Super Mario Bros. The father of four once related how son Henry, then 6, asked him why he took such a role. "I said, 'Well, Henry, I did that so you could have shoes.' And he said, 'Dad, I don't need shoes that badly.' "
There are almost 200 film and TV credits on his resume, not to mention an equal number of appearances on talk shows and at awards ceremonies, narrating jobs and behind-the-scenes video footage. That's an astonishing sum for someone who, by his own admission, spent the last five years before he got sober consuming the following: "A half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine a day — and that wasn't to get high, that was just to keep going, man. I was a nightmare. I finally just shorted out."
Hopper knew he was lucky to survive such '60s-enabled excesses, especially after being blackballed by the industry for eight years until Francis Ford Coppola cast him as a hyper-manic photojournalist who rambles on about Marlon Brando's nutty Col. Kurtz in 1979's Apocalypse Now . "I should have been dead 10 times over," The actor said. "I've thought about that a lot. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around."
For movie lovers, it is a good thing he hung in there. Given his colorful past, he was reborn as an elder statesman of cool thanks to associating with cutting-edge filmmakers who supplied their idol with custom-tailored roles. Would David Lynch's surreal noir Blue Velvet (1986) be half as riveting without Hopper's Frank Booth, a nitrous-oxide-huffing sadomasochist of a criminal with a fetish for both the title fabric and F-word-studded profanity?
As he famously told Lynch: "You have to let me play Frank Booth. Because I am Frank Booth!"
And consider the odd sort of pathos that he lent to Feck, a one-legged ex-biker and drug pusher who prefers the companionship of a blow-up doll ever since shooting his girlfriend's head off 20 years before in River's Edge (1987).
And who can forget his decidedly non-PC turn in Tony Scott's True Romance (1993). As the father of Christian Slater's on-the-run comic-book store clerk, Hopper stops the show while being tortured by Christopher Walken's gangster kingpin with a vividly delivered Quentin Tarantino-penned reverie about Sicilians.
By the time his mad bomber sent Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves on that wild goose chase in 1994's Speed and he hassled Kevin Costner's fish man as a bald, eye-patch-sporting futuristic pirate in 1995's Waterworld , Hopper was on top of the deranged villain heap.
Adding to his rep with Gen X: A series of attention-getting Nike ads in which he played an obsessed fan posing as a football ref who confronts various NFL superstars.
A native of Dodge City, Kansas, who was raised on a farm, he excelled at drama in high school and earned a scholarship to San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, where he performed Shakespeare. The novice made an early splash as an epileptic on the early '50s TV series Medic and became a hot property. Though telling Columbia Pictures fearsome exec Harry Cohn ( to "buzz off" (but with a less-polite four-letter word) after the mogul insulted his Shakespearean training didn't exactly help his cause — especially after he got thrown off the lot and was banned from the studio.
He went to New York to study Method acting with Lee Strasburg, and paid his dues in a string of Western roles, both in features (1965's The Sons of Katie Elder and 1969's True Grit with John Wayne, 1969's Hang 'Em High) and on TV (Wagon Train, Bonanza, Gunsmoke), as well as appearing in 1967's Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman.
But it was 1967's The Trip, an LSD-laced exploitation flick, and 1968's Head, the far-out cult film starring the Monkees, that would bring him into contact with such future Easy Rider collaborators as Fonda and Jack Nicholson. The rest is psychedelic cinema history.
Hopper, who as a child in Kansas was once taught painting by Midwest master Thomas Hart Benton, became a professional photographer early in his career and had a knack for collecting art. One of his first buys was an Andy Warhol soup can that sold for $75 in 1962. His own work is on display in galleries around the world.
He has had his share of celebrity feuds over the years, including losing a defamation lawsuit filed by actor Rip Torn after Hopper told Jay Leno on the air in 1994 that Torn pulled a knife on him during pre-production of Easy Rider. (Torn, who was replaced in the cast by Nicholson as an alcoholic lawyer, said it was Hopper who pulled the knife.) Hopper also sued Fonda over the film's script credits and his percentage of proceeds from the sale of rights.
Probably the most shocking thing about the clean-and-sober Hopper, however, isn't that he appeared in no fewer than seven films last year. It's that he was a card-carrying Republican who defied the liberal leanings of most of his Hollywood cohorts. But despite years of being a Bush supporter, he showed his rebel side once more when he voted for Obama — as a protest against Sarah Palin, as he explained on TV's The View .
Given his past indiscretions, Hopper was never one for nostalgia. But he did once humbly sum up his success this way. "I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life."
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