Dennis Hopper, the hard-living Hollywood star with acclaimed roles in films including Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider, died yesterday of prostate cancer. He passed away at his home in Venice, California, at the age of 74.
He was surrounded by his family and friends and died peacefully at around 9am local time.
His private life was as variable as his professional one. He married five times and fathered four children. One of his marriages, to his second wife, Michelle Phillips, a singer in the group The Mamas and the Papas, lasted just eight days in 1970. Of the experience Hopper famously quipped: Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one. His final marriage, to actress Victoria Duffy took place in 1996. The pair were undergoing a bitter divorce when he died. So bitter, in fact, that a dreadfully ill Hopper sought a restraining order against his spouse even though he was dying and virtually bedridden.
Hopper’s private life was often blighted by tales of hard-drinking and drug-taking. He confessed that he used cocaine in order to sober himself up so he could binge on more alcohol. His problems and lifestyle became the stuff of Hollywood legend – or nightmare. He once spent time on a New Mexico commune drinking spirits, taking drugs and firing machine guns. He was committed to a psychiatric ward in 1984 after experiencing violent hallucinations.
Nothing in Hopper’s personal life could overshadow a handful of truly great screen performances. In 1969′s Easy Rider, which he directed, co-wrote and co-starred in, Hopper explored the hippy counter-culture and the reaction to the Vietnam war. He dubbed the film his state of the union message and it was a roaring critical success, paving the way for the New Hollywood of the 1970s and directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Then in Apocalypse Now Hopper seemed to blend reality and fiction with his portrayal of a burned-out and insane war photographer. Finally, Hopper’s portrayal of a sadistic brute, Frank Booth, in David Lynch’s surreal Blue Velvet introduced the actor to an entirely new generation of fans.
Dennis Hopper graced the Melon Farmers with an excellent banned chainsaw duel in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
His appearance in The Trip was banned by James Ferman who was quoted as saying In the wrong hands, a tremendous advertisement for LSD. In the film Dennis Hopper educates Peter Fonda in the pleasures of mind expansion.
And of course there was the unforgettable scene in True Romance where little guy Hopper so eloquently taunts the sophisticated Mafiosi Christopher Walken, with ‘your mom was fucked by niggers’.
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