Dennis Hopper never won an Oscar but to my mind he was one of the great actors of the past 50 years and had a career that consisted of repeated highs (pardon the pun), repeated falls from grace and amazing comebacks.

Starting on TV in 1954, the year I was born, a year later he was in Rebel Without a Cause and a year after that in Giant.  From ’54 to ’68, according to IMDB, he made more than 60 appearances in films & TV series.  He was in lots of westerns, many of them good, though he was rarely essential to those films’ success – Gunfight at the OK Corral, From Hell to Texas, Hang Em High; and on TV he showed up on The Rifleman, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, even Petticoat Junction.  He wasn’t really famous but he was working constantly.

His breakout came, of course, in 1969 in Easy Rider, as co-star, co-writer and director.  Two years later, he self-destructed, directing what seemed to be the appropriately titled The Last Movie.   In 1979 he resurfaced in Apocalypse Now but, if tales are to be believed, he was impossible to work with thanks to his various addictions.

Another comeback in 1986 in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where he played one of the few genuinely scary screen villains.  After that, it’s said that he never said no to a role and IMDB shows him making more than 100 film & TV appearances since then.  Nominated for an Oscar in ’87 for Hoosiers.   Directing Colors, an under-rated L.A. cop drama starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.  The bad guy in box office smash Speed in 1994.

But for me, after Easy Rider and Blue Velvet, my favorite Dennis Hopper appearance, the one that I can watch over and over and over again, was his role as Clifford Worley in True Romance – something Quentin Tarantino wrote before Reservoir Dogs and then directed by Tony Scott, who pumped things up to 11.  Hopper’s not the bad guy here, he’s one of the good guys.  He’s a former cop, a security guard, a recovering alcoholic living in a trailer on the edge of town.  And he has a scene with Christopher Walken, some of Tarantino’s best writing to date, and he steals the scene from Walken and makes it look easy.

He’d been ill from prostate cancer for some time and his death didn’t come as a surprise.  Even so, when I saw the news this morning, I said to myself, “aw gee.”  For me, what makes him great is that he was one of the few actors who elevated almost everything he was in.   In the past ten years he was in some good stuff, he was in a lot of crap, but whenever I’d come across him on screen, he was always worth watching.

Some photos I’ve stolen from around the web:

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