https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/movi ... actor.htmlHarry Dean Stanton, Character Actor Who Became a Star, Dies at 91
By ANITA GATESSEPT. 15, 2017
Harry Dean Stanton, the gaunt, hollow-eyed, scene-stealing character actor who broke out of obscurity in his late 50s in two starring movie roles and capped his career with an acclaimed characterization as a corrupt polygamist on the HBO series “Big Love,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 91.
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But he remained largely unknown to the general public until 1984, when the seemingly impossible, or at least the unexpected, happened: Mr. Stanton, the quintessential supporting player, became a leading man.
That year he starred as a wandering amnesiac reunited with his family in Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and as a fast-talking automobile thief training Emilio Estevez in the ways of his world in Alex Cox’s cult comedy “Repo Man.”
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Mr. Stanton was cast in one of his best-known roles when he was almost 80: that of Roman Grant, a self-proclaimed prophet with 14 wives, on “Big Love,” HBO’s acclaimed series about the everyday lives of polygamists. After his character was killed in the Season 3 finale in 2009, he joked that the show had generated more response than anything else he had done, “except for a couple hundred other movies.”
Mr. Stanton had an impressive singing voice and toured with a male chorus early in his career. He first sang on screen in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), doing three numbers, including the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” He later formed the Harry Dean Stanton Band, which played rock, blues, jazz and Tex-Mex numbers in Los Angeles nightclubs and on tour.
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Mr. Stanton — who was often billed as Dean Stanton early in his career to avoid confusion with another character actor, Harry Stanton — made his first television appearance in 1954 in an episode of “Inner Sanctum,” a syndicated mystery and suspense anthology series. His film debut was in “Tomahawk Trail,” a 1957 western starring Chuck Connors, and for the first two decades of his career westerns were his specialty.
Among the numerous TV westerns on which he was seen were “Rawhide,” “Bonanza” and “The Big Valley.” He was also on eight episodes of “Gunsmoke,” playing a different character in each. His last western film was Arthur Penn’s unorthodox “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), starring Marlon Brando and Mr. Stanton’s onetime roommate Jack Nicholson.
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He then summed up his adult life. “To put it mildly,” he said, “I was just a very late bloomer.”
The life of repo man . . .
The life of repo man . . .
is always intense. The ultimate quirky character actor bids us farewell: