In the first half of his career, Stanton made scores of television appearances, mainly westerns, and dozens of films, mostly in brief roles. His face but not his name gained recognition.
That is until he came into more focus in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a downtrodden engineer on the doomed spaceship. Then, in 1984, greatness was thrust upon him when he was given two of his rare leading roles, in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, which were, understandably, his own favourites. A few years later, he was celebrated by Debbie Harryin the 1989 Blondie hit I Want That Man.
Stanton was born in a small town in Kentucky, where his father, Sheridan Harry Stanton, was a tobacco farmer and barber, and his mother, Ersel, a hairdresser and cook. After leaving high school in 1944, he served in the US navy in the second world war, during which he saw action in Okinawa. He then returned to study journalism and radio at the University of Kentucky, where he became seriously interested in acting after playing Alfred Doolittle in a college production of Pygmalion. [Source: The Guardian]
Marlon Brando used to telephone his friend Harry Dean Stanton late at night in the 1970s to chat about acting. “He taught me Shakespearean monologues from The Tempest and Macbeth,” recalled Stanton.
Stanton’s favourite soliloquy was Macbeth’s one about life being “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” which Stanton would recite to friends and strangers and follow by saying: “Great line, eh?”
The meaning of life and death, and whether existence is anything more than a “black void”, is also at the heart of Stanton’s final movie, Lucky, which he completed just six months before he died at the age of 91 on 15 September 2017.
In Lucky, which marks John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut, he plays a loner called Lucky in a small Californian desert town who is meditating on his past and his own mortality. The character echoes Stanton’s own life, with scriptwriters Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja drawing on the experiences of one of the most remarkable actors of modern times.
Lucky explains that his name comes from his time in the Second World War when he served aboard USS Landing Ship Tank (LST) 970, as did Stanton himself. “I was in the battle of Okinawa,” the actor recalled. “People who are actors now don’t have that kind of life experience; I saw action on a ship. I was damn lucky I didn’t get blown up or killed.” [Source: The Independent]
Stanton was born in West Irvine, Kentucky, to Sheridan Harry Stanton, a tobacco farmer and barber and Ersel (née Moberly), a cook.[2] His parents divorced when Stanton was in high school; both later remarried.
Stanton had two younger brothers, Archie and Ralph, and a younger half-brother, Stanley McKnight. His family had a musical background. Stanton attended Lafayette High School and the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he performed at the Guignol Theatre under the direction of British theater director Wallace Briggs, and studied journalism and radio arts.
"I could have been a writer," he told an interviewer for a 2011 documentary, Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland, in which he sings and plays the harmonica. "I had to decide if I wanted to be a singer or an actor. I was always singing. I thought if I could be an actor, I could do all of it." Briggs encouraged him to leave the university and become an actor. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California, where his classmates included his friends Tyler MacDuff and Dana Andrews.
During World War II, Stanton served in the United States Navy, including a stint as a cook aboard the USS LST-970, a Landing Ship, Tank, during the Battle of Okinawa.
After Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, he spent three years at the University of Kentucky and appeared in several plays. Determined to make it in Hollywood, he picked tobacco to earn his fare west.
Three years at the Pasadena Playhouse prepared him for television and movies.
For decades, Mr. Stanton lived in a small, dishevelled house overlooking the San Fernando Valley and was a fixture at the West Hollywood landmark Dan Tana’s. He was attacked in his home in 1996 by two robbers who forced their way in, tied him up at gunpoint, beat him, ransacked the house and fled in his Lexus. He was not seriously hurt, and the assailants, who were captured, were sentenced to prison.
Mr. Stanton never married, although he had a long relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay, nearly 35 years his junior. “She left me for Tom Cruise,” Mr. Stanton said often.
“I might have had two or three [kids] out of marriage,” he once recalled. “But that’s another story.”
Stanton generally gave the impression he’d rather be someplace else, alone. That was one of the things that made him different from most movie actors (let alone, a ‘star’). He was pissed off with the world, unimpressed with himself, and he didn’t care to hide it. It amused him, rather.
Disillusionment carries with it at least the ashes of enchantment, and no matter how tough his bark, or how tightly his thin lips sneered around another smoke, Harry Dean could never entirely extinguish a forlorn smile, the promise of romance buried behind his eyes. He’d give you that blank, flat look, but then he’d pick up a guitar and show you his heart, still breaking.
Is that Harry Dean, or Travis from Paris, Texas? You can’t slip a cigarette paper between them, which is why this seems to me one of the indelible, singular performances in the American cinema, an unvarnished and achingly vulnerable portrait of a dead man walking, lost in the wilderness, little by little coaxed back to life and attempting to restore some of the damage he’s done. Wim Wenders has said the actor doubted himself, that he didn’t know if he was strong enough to carry an entire movie on his shoulders. That fear is crucial to the film, the key to its emotional reach.
Almost always cast as a crook, a codger, an eccentric or a loser, he appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows in a career dating to the mid-1950s. He had been a cult favorite since the 1970s with roles in “Cockfighter,” “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Cisco Pike.” His more famous credits included the Oscar-winning epic “The Godfather: Part II” (1974), the sci-fi classic “Alien” (1979) and the teen flick “Pretty in Pink” (1986), in which he played Molly Ringwald’s father.
In his later years he had fruitful collaborations with the director David Lynch, in Wild at Heart (1990), Inland Empire (2006), Twin Peaks (on both TV and the big screen) and an outstanding performance as the brother in The Straight Story (1999). He was also featured in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), the following year’s The Green Mile, the comedies Anger Management (2003) and You, Me and Dupree (2006), Nick Cassavetes’ unpleasant Alpha Dog (2007), the offbeat animation Rango and equally bizarre This Must Be the Place (both 2011) and Marvel’s The Avengers (2012). He had a prominent role as Roman Grant in the HBO television series Big Love between 2006 and 2011.
