[27] In 1999, he starred in The Prophet's Game (a dark thriller), directed by David Worth and also starring Stephanie Zimbalist, Robert Yocum, Sandra Locke, Joe Penny and Tracey Birdsall. In 2011, Barricade Books published film historian Peter L. Winkler's biography, Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel. Dennis Hopper, in full Dennis Lee Hopper, (born May 17, 1936, Dodge City, Kansas, U.S.died May 29, 2010, Los Angeles, California), American film actor, director, and writer who rose to fame as a countercultural icon in the 1960s and later developed into a noted character actor. What went down behind those corrugated steel walls of Dennis Hoppers Venice fortress as he lay dying at age 74? [3] Film critic Matthew Hays wrote "no other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper".[4]. Hopper found greater fame for portraying the villains of the films Super Mario Bros. (1993), Speed (1994), and Waterworld (1995). Hopper was reported to have an uncredited role in Johnny Guitar in 1954, but he has stated that he was not in Hollywood when this film was made. Actor Dennis Hopper has died of complications from prostate cancer. Fonda produced "Easy Rider" and Hopper directed it for a meager $380,000. The success of "Easy Rider," and the spectacular failure of his next film, "The Last Movie," fit the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favorites as "Apocalypse Now" and "Hoosiers." Hopper filmed scenes for The Other Side of the Wind in 1971, appearing as himself; after decades of legal, financial and technical delays, the film was finally released on Netflix in 2018.[6]. [35] During this period he created the cover art for the Ike & Tina Turner album River Deep Mountain High (released in 1966). Legal Statement. It began in 1986 when he played an alcoholic ex-basketball star in "Hoosiers," which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Also in 1986, Hopper portrayed Lt. Enright in the comedy horror The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. He was 74. When Jeremy went to his room to wake him, he found Hof stone cold dead. "He wouldn't hold back with his positive re-enforcement. Cash said the song was written by Kris Kristofferson about Hopper. A union with actress Daria Halprin also ended in divorce after they had a daughter, Ruthana. [67], On September 28, 2009, Hopper, then 73, was reportedly taken by ambulance to an unidentified Manhattan hospital wearing an oxygen mask and "with numerous tubes visible". It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office. "Much of Hollywood," wrote critic-historian David Thomson, "found Hopper a pain in the neck.". He confirmed his status as a rising star the next year, as the son of a wealthy rancher played by Rock Hudson in Giant, the epic western also starring Elizabeth Taylor and Dean. Murdoch has survived scandal after scandal. He also left behind valuable life lessons about prostate cancer.. But, again, he made a remarkable comeback, starting with a memorable performance as a drugged-out journalist in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, "Apocalypse Now," a spectacularly long and troubled film to shoot. You always got something unexpected from him. Hopper's acting career has spanned almost six decades. ", Guitarist Slash tweeted, "You take the great ones for granted until they're gone. He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles. The success of "Easy Rider," and the spectacular failure of his next film, "The Last Movie," fit the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favorites as "Apocalypse Now" and "Hoosiers." His photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 civil-rights march in Selma, Alabama, were published. She said Taos was "his heart home.". 1 on iTunes Charts, 36 songs, no apologies: Morgan Wallen delivers more (much more) of what made him countrys king, Joy Behar kicks off Joys Banned Book Club with gay-penguin tale And Tango Makes Three, Hidden, illegal casinos are booming in L.A., with organized crime reaping big profits, Look up: The 32 most spectacular ceilings in Los Angeles, 19 cafes that make L.A. a world-class coffee destination, Best coffee city in the world? Described as a pothead, womanizer, and drunk, the late actor Larry Hagman lived life like an eternal party. In 1957, he played Billy the Kid on the episode "Brannigan's Boots" of Sugarfoot with Will Hutchins. In later years he picked up some income by becoming a pitchman for Ameriprise Financial, aiming ads at baby boomers looking ahead to retirement. He was a two-time Academy Award nominee, and in March 2010, was honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. "All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job - two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be.". ", Its success prompted studio heads to schedule a new kind of movie: low cost, with inventive photography and themes about a young, restive baby boom generation. The film earned Hopper a Cannes Film Festival Award for "Best First Work" and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (shared with Fonda and Southern). Getty Images "It was the first show-biz hotel to allow black. [71], On March 18, 2010, he was honored with the 2,403rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. [60] On March 9, 2010, Duffy refused to move out of the Hopper home, despite the court's order that she do so by March 15. From that point on, Hopper maintained a frantic work pace, appearing in many forgettable movies and a few memorable ones, including 1993's "True Romance," where he played a well-meaning ex-cop trying to protect his son from a gangster played by Christopher Walken. During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago. He was 74. Illness and death Now wouldnt that make you a paranoiac? Dennis asked rhetorically. Hopper stated that because he was the son-in-law of actress Margaret Sullavan, a friend of John Wayne, Wayne hired Hopper for a role in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), also directed by Hathaway, which enabled Hopper to restart his film career. [64] The hearing also dealt with who would be the beneficiary on Hopper's life insurance policy, which listed his wife as a beneficiary. Hopper died Saturday at his home in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, surrounded by family and friends, family friend Alex Hitz said. When Hopper was a teenager, his family settled in San Diego, California, where he began performing at the Old . From there he went to Warner Bros., where he made "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant" while in his late teens. "'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me," Hopper said in 2009. "[25] He won critical acclaim and several awards for this role, and in the same year received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as an alcoholic assistant basketball coach in Hoosiers. He was nominated for an Emmy Award[26] for the 1991 HBO film Paris Trout. Get the best of Fox News' entertainment coverage, right in your inbox. Known in the motion picture industry for his anti-establishment. We hung out together while my tape recorder consumed cassette after cassette of Dennis Hopper stories. Dennis Hopper Death Certificate 6/7/2010 7:43 PM PT TMZ has just obtained Dennis Hopper 's death certificate . Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. When it was released, "The Last Movie" was such a crashing failure that it made Hopper unwanted in Hollywood for a decade. On the way, Hopper and Fonda befriend a drunken young lawyer (Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper had resisted casting, in a breakout role), but arouse the enmity of Southern rednecks and are murdered before they can return home. He said:. When he was 13, Hopper and his family moved to San Diego, where his mother worked as a lifeguard instructor and his father was a post office manager, having previously served in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, in World War II in the China Burma India Theater. "A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.". Treatment at a detox clinic helped him stop drinking but he still used cocaine, and at one point he became so hallucinatory that he was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles hospital. They had a daughter, Marin, before Hopper's drug-induced violence led to divorce after eight years. His eye for modern art was uncanny, resulting in a multimillion-dollar collection. His second marriage, to singer-actress Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, lasted only eight days. Actor known for his dramatic performances in films such as Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, and Speed. But Mr. Hoppers after-hours style continued to affect his work; in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines. That film, Easy Rider, which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans. Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. Hopper was drugged-out off camera, too, and his rambling chatter was worked into the final cut. Mostly on your own? ", "So long Dennis," tweeted actress Virginia Madsen, who starred in "The Hot Spot." In 2008 he also played The Death in Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting. You've successfully subscribed to this newsletter! Hopper appeared on the final two episodes of the cult 1991 television show Fishing with John with host John Lurie. He was twice nominated for Oscars. Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series Crash, an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. "A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.". UPDATE: Here's the Associated Press obituary. Hopper had a supporting role as the bet-taker, "Babalugats", in Cool Hand Luke (1967). RIP Dennis Hopper.". All rights reserved. With Hopper hailed as a brilliant filmmaker, Universal Pictures lavished $850,000 on his next project, "The Last Movie.". All was forgiven, at least for a moment, when he collaborated with another struggling actor, Peter Fonda, on a script about two pot-smoking, drug-dealing hippies on a motorcycle trip through the Southwest and South to take in the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper has died at the age of 74 following a battle with prostate cancer. When he finally completed filming, he retired to his home in Taos, N.M., to piece together the film, a process that took almost a year, in part because he was using psychedelic drugs for editing inspiration. My mother had an incredible body. During his childhood in the 1940s, the military notified the Hoppers that Dennis father had been killed in the Pacific; after V-J Day, his father returned from the dead the death notice had been a cover as he served as a spy. May 30, 2010, 3:43 PM. Date Of Birth: May 17, 1936 Date Of Death: May 29, 2010 Cause Of Death: N/A Ethnicity: White Nationality: American Dennis Hopper was born on the 17th of May, 1936. In later years he picked up some income by becoming a pitchman for Ameriprise Financial, aiming ads at baby boomers looking ahead to retirement. If a persons manner of dying is a distillation of his life, then Hoppers death seemed a revisit of the same stories about a man once called the patron saint of the deranged. Never an easy rider. Thats gotta be my focus., Doubleday pulled the plug on our initial effort to collaborate and Hopper went on to direct Colors., After Colors opened, without preamble Hopper phoned. Biography - A Short Wiki. After World War II, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where the young Hopper attended Saturday art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. Fonda produced "Easy Rider" and Hopper directed it for a meager $380,000. After staging a "suicide attempt" (really more of a daredevil act) in a coffin using 17 sticks of dynamite during an "art happening" at the Rice University Media Center (filmed by professor and documentary filmmaker Brian Huberman),[24] and later disappearing into the Mexican desert during a particularly extravagant bender, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation program in 1983. The series starred Chuck Connors and the premiere episode "The Sharpshooter" was written by Sam Peckinpah.[28]. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing irreconcilable differences for the filing. He was 74. I soon discovered that the gallery crasher was Hopper, that hed 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. He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in Hoosiers (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like Blue Velvet (also in 1986), Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series 24 (2002). He subsequently appeared in over 140 episodes of television shows such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Petticoat Junction, The Twilight Zone, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Defenders, The Investigators, The Legend of Jesse James, Entourage, The Big Valley, The Time Tunnel, and Combat!. [45] The title of the exhibition, Double Standard, was taken from Hopper's iconic 1961 photograph of the two Standard Oil signs seen through an automobile windshield at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and North Doheny Drive on historic Route 66 in Los Angeles. [34] Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in the 1961 Bel Air Fire, which burned hundreds of homes, including his and his wife's, on Stone Canyon Road[35] in Bel Air. Journalist Ann Hornaday wrote: "With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion". It wasnt my liver, my kidneys and all that stuff that went. Hopper sadly passed away in 2010, aged 74. It began in 1986 when he played an alcoholic ex-basketball star in "Hoosiers," which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Fonda tried to get . In 1988, he directed Colors, a critically acclaimed police procedural about gang violence in Los Angeles starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. But alcohol and drugs continued to interfere with his work. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. In Taos, I met many people who loathed Hopper, and many who remembered him as their hero and champion and friend. He wanted a lot of sex. Prince Harry addresses 'Spare' backlash in interview: 'I have never looked for sympathy in this', Shania Twain was 'uncontrollably fragile' from ex Mutt Lange's affair with friend: 'How could I be so stupid', Olivia Newton-John's daughter Chloe reveals 'promise' she made to mother before her death, Emma Stones 'And' co-star Willem Dafoe had her slap him 20 times to get scene right, Prince Harry's 'attacks' on 'villain' Camilla led to Frogmore Cottage eviction: expert, Film industry reacts to death of 'Saving Private Ryan' star Tom Sizemore: 'You're a legend'. [18] The production was plagued by creative differences and personal acrimony between Fonda and Hopper, the dissolution of Hopper's marriage to Brooke Hayward, his unwillingness to leave the editor's desk and his accelerating abuse of drugs and alcohol. I pried at its edge with my keys until the trap cracked loose. Upon his release, Hopper joined Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drugs and launched yet another comeback. Despite Duffy's bid to be named the sole beneficiary of Hopper's million-dollar policy, the judge ruled against her and limited her claim to one-quarter of the policy. But success as a Hollywood star brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas.. A washer and dryer stood at the foot of the stairs to his Venice studio. His intimate and unguarded images of Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda, The Byrds, Paul Newman, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Brown, Peter Fonda, Ed Ruscha, the Grateful Dead, Michael McClure, and Timothy Leary, among others, became the subject of gallery and museum shows and were collected in several books, including "1712 North Crescent Heights." Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. Hopper's lawyer argued in the divorce case that his estranged wife's presence was hampering his fight with cancer, but the judge allowed her to continue living in the family's Venice compound with their 6-year-old daughter, Galen. ", Its success prompted studio heads to schedule a new kind of movie: low cost, with inventive photography and themes about a young, restive baby boom generation. Hopper repeatedly mentioned a knife fight with Rip Torn on the Easy Rider location, but that never happened either. He had Scottish ancestors. Actor known for his dramatic performances in films such as Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, and Speed. The same year, he starred as Deacon, the one-eyed nemesis of Kevin Costner in Waterworld. With Hopper hailed as a brilliant filmmaker, Universal Pictures lavished $850,000 on his next project, "The Last Movie.". Hopper took a large cast and crew to a village in Peru to film the tale of a Peruvian tribe corrupted by a movie company. [22] During the tumultuous editing process, Hopper ensconced himself at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, which he had purchased in 1970,[23] for almost an entire year. [72] Surrounded by family, fans, and friendsincluding Jack Nicholson, Viggo Mortensen, David Lynch, and Michael Madsenhe attended its addition to the sidewalk six days later. A judge ruled in Torn's favor and Hopper was ordered to pay US$475,000 in damages. I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. [16] In 1961, Hopper played his first lead role in Night Tide, an atmospheric supernatural thriller involving a mermaid in an amusement park. [1][2], Hopper made his directorial film debut with Easy Rider (1969), which he and co-star Peter Fonda wrote with Terry Southern. or redistributed. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. Dennis Hopper reached the respectable age of 74 years. In 1959 Hopper moved to New York to study Method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. "That's all I can do.". Hopper did not attend the hearing. But, again, he made a remarkable comeback, starting with a memorable performance as a drugged-out journalist in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, "Apocalypse Now," a spectacularly long and troubled film to shoot. Dennis died of prostate cancer on May 29, 2010, less than two weeks after his 74th birthday. [9] Hopper had two brothers, Marvin and David.[10]. It was my mind.. The idea was to break through inhibitions in order to become a better artist.. After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day. The media is focusing on the psychopathic roles and his 1960s iconic status. Hes smart about these things. When I pressed, he explained: Theres a chance, if I play things right, Ill finally direct a studio picture. The Dennis Hopper Trust Collection represents Hopper's directorial efforts.[79]. Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography. For years he lived in Los Angeles' bohemian beach community of Venice, in a house designed by acclaimed architect Frank Gehry. The old rebel contributed money to the Republican Party in recent years, but also voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.. He appeared as a "crazed referee" in those ads. He attended the Actors Studio, made his first television appearance in 1954, and soon after appeared alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant (1956). Hopper was unable to capitalize on his Easy Rider success for several years. Hopper appeared in all 22 episodes that were filmed. Production was reportedly often delayed by his unreliable behavior. Sex is something that has to be in the book, he insisted. He remembered his mother: She was wild, very emotional, a screamer and a yeller. Over his lifetime he amassed a formidable array of 20th- and 21st-century art, including many of Julian Schnabel's works (such as a shattered-plate portrait of Hopper); numerous works from his early cohorts, such as Ed Ruscha, Edward Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein (Sinking Sun, 1964),[41] and Warhol (Double Mona Lisa, 1963);[35] and pieces by contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst and Robin Rhode. UPDATE: Here's the Associated Press obituary. In 1995, Hopper played a greedy TV self-help guru, Dr. Luther Waxling in Search and Destroy. He appeared as an arrogant young gunfighter, the Utah Kid, in the 1956 episode "Quicksand" of the first hour-long western television series Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker.