DENNIS HOPPER : OBITUARY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

Maverick filmmaker and actor Hopper dies

By Nigel Andrews

Published: Last updated: May 30 2010 13:07

Being a gifted actor and maverick filmmaker was just part of the life of Dennis Hopper, who died 74. He was an amateur photographer and painter. He was an art expert. He was, or had been, a famous and self-confessed drug abuser. He was a political radical and rebel in the 1970s, who later called himself a Republican and voted for George W Bush. It is almost impossible to count the number of different Dennis Hoppers. It is equally hard not to marvel that a life lived that intensely and variously – a life that once seemed designed for burnout - lasted for so long.

One of his biggest contributions to cinema was Easy Rider (1969). This hippy odyssey across America, which cost barely more than the price of its fleet of Harley-Davidsons, changed Hollywood. At a single lightning stroke, in a film directed by Hopper and scripted by him with writer Terry Southern and co-actor Peter Fonda, the spendthrift giantism of old Hollywood was felled like an oak. The critically acclaimed film, a commercial phenomenon, laid the ground bare for an era of young-thinking cinema, for the new breed of Coppola, Altman, Malick, Scorsese.

Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas, on May 17th 1936. He studied at the Actors Studio. Befriending James Dean, he won early screen roles with him in Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). With his gnarled pumpkin features and fierce-eyed intensity, Hopper was good at portraying the dark side of teenage angst, contrasted with Dean’s heartthrob antiheroes.

After success as a TV actor in the early 60s, he began to put the Hopper ‘brand’ on American cinema with films such as The Trip (1967), a hallucinatory drugs drama, followed by Easy Rider. Both films had the participation of Hopper’s friend, the young Jack Nicholson, who screenwrote the first and became a star with the second.

With Hollywood at his feet, though, Hopper spurned the offered career opportunity. His drug habit reached its height - at one point three grams of cocaine a day, plus multiple beers – and when he finally presented another feature film it was The Last Movie (1971): arch and pretentious, impenetrable to most audiences and insufferable to others. It ended Hopper’s Hollywood credit rating as a director.

After half a decade sorting out his drug problems he returned with a different product: he was now a character actor. He was a flakey visionary at the heart of a war (Apocalypse Now, 1979). He was monomaniacal and mentally disturbed in Blue Velvet (1986) – his most brilliant performance – and in Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995). For a while he was Hollywood’s favourite villain. As footnotes to his directing history, he made Out of the Blue (1980), a film about unsettled teenagers, and Colors (1988), a critically esteemed police drama. His acting career continued almost uninterrupted until he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in October 2009.

Married five times, Hopper left four children. Away from the screen, he became a major art collector. Politically one of the last acts in his life, as a radical turned Republican, was to turn again and vote for Barack Obama.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.