Dean's List: A Harry Dean Stanton Film Festival

"Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night."
- William Shakespeare, "Henry V"


When Harry Dean Stanton passed away September 15, 2017, at the age of 91, he left a legion of friends and fans, who were convinced the chain-smoking actor had figured out how to defy the odds, saddened and disappointed. In a career that spanned over 60 years, Stanton made over 100 feature films and around 100 television appearances. If an individual could ever be described as an "old soul," it would have to be Harry Dean.

Even in one of his earlier screen roles, as the Gospel-singing "Tramp" in 1967's "Cool Hand Luke," the 41-year-old actor already bore the semblance of an old soul.

In obituaries and in the words of friends, time and again, he was described as "perennially gaunt and hollow-eyed" and "bedraggled," with a "hangdog, morose visage and face etched with crevices" as he portrayed "grizzled loners and colorful offbeat characters." The Los Angeles Times noted, "With his rail-thin, perpetually haunted mien and his unique flair for playing drifters, grifters and other unconventional, sometimes eccentric outsiders and naturalism, Stanton rose from early obscurity to become a mainstay in films from the 1970s onward." Kris Kristofferson (pictured below), Stanton's friend, fellow musician, and costar in "Cisco Pike" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," described him as "wolf-like, lonely, dangerous and friendly at the same time."

Harry Dean Stanton was born in a small tobacco-growing community in Kentucky. His father was a tobacco farmer who also worked as a barber, his mother was a former cook. The simple house was circled on either side by the town cemetery.

After high school, Harry Dean served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II and saw action on Okinawa. He became interested in acting after playing Alfred Doolittle in a college production of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion." He dropped out of the University of Kentucky and, using money from the G.I. Bill, he moved to Los Angeles and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Harry Dean Stanton (far right) keeps an eye on durable character
actor John Dehner in "Revolt at Fort Laramie."

After uncredited bit parts in the TV mystery anthology series "Inner Sanctum" and in director Alfred Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man," as well as a B-western titled "Revolt at Fort Laramie" (pictured above), Stanton received on-screen billing in the 1957 cavalry horse opera "Tomahawk Trail" (pictured below).

Harry Dean Stanton plays a private alongside pre-"Rifleman"
Chuck Connors' sergeant in "Tomahawk Trail."

For a number of years, Harry Dean was originally billed as Dean Stanton, to avoid confusion with an already established supporting-role actor named Harry Stanton (pictured below).

Harry Stanton (center) senses an attraction between date Sharon
Tate and lounge singer Tony Scotti in 1967's "Valley of the Dolls."

An overview of Harry Dean Stanton's filmography would be a voluminous undertaking, so what we'd like to do in the Moviehouse is to jab and nudge at spots in his career, kind of like a fireplace poker stirring up scattered embers here and there.

Maybe it was his lean, rawboned look, maybe it was the Kentucky tinge to his tongue, but after the aforementioned "Revolt at Fort Laramie" and "Tomahawk Trail," Stanton was frequently cast in supporting roles in several westerns, as well as appearing in such sagebrush series as "Rawhide," "Bonanza," "Gunsmoke," and "The Big Valley." Heck, he probably brought his own Levis for wardrobe.

In 1962's Cinerama spectacle "How the West Was Won," which seemingly featured every major western movie star, including John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Richard Widmark, Stanton popped up in an unbilled role as a member of Eli Wallach's gang of train-robbing outlaws (pictured below).

In 1966, executive producer Roger Corman suggested Monte Hellman direct two westerns back-to-back, both starring Jack Nicholson. Hellman got his first break in filmmaking directing "Beast from Haunted Cave" for Corman, while Nicholson spent a part of his early career being directed by Corman in such movies as the original "The Little Shop of Horrors" and "The Raven." Hellman ended up making a pair of extraordinarily existential westerns: "The Shooting," which was written by Carole Eastman (later an Oscar nominee for "Five Easy Pieces"), and "Ride in the Whirlwind," scripted by Nicholson himself.

Jack Nicholson plays a cowpoke wrongfully pursued by
a vigilante posse in "Ride in the Whirlwind."

Wearing a derby and an eyepatch, Harry Dean Stanton portrayed Blind Dick, the laconic leader of an outlaw band in "Ride in the Whirlwind." Stanton later asserted that he learned how to "act natural" after Jack Nicholson, who cast him in the film, told him, "I don't want you to do anything. Let the wardrobe play the character." Stanton recalled, "Which meant just play yourself...After that, my whole approach to acting opened up."

Monte Hellman, undoubtedly one of cinema's most anomalous filmmakers, worked with Harry Dean Stanton on three more films. Hellman's 1971 cult road movie "Two-Lane Blacktop," featuring singer James Taylor and The Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, along with Warren Oates, as itinerant drag racers, cast Stanton as a lonesome gay Oklahoma hitchhiker (pictured below).

"Two-Lane Blacktop" was the first film that credited Harry as "H.D. Stanton." Stanton reteamed with director and costar Warren Oates in a genuine curio from 1974 titled "Cockfighter," featuring Oates as the title character, who has taken a vow of silence until he wins Cockfighter of the Year award. On the one hand, Oates' mute performance has been hailed as one of the best in his career, on the other, the obscure movie was the only one backed by producer Roger Corman in the 1970s that lost money.

Harry Dean Stanton plays a fellow cocker in "Cockfighter."

Stanton and Oates were reunited, as unscrupulous Key West charter fishermen in 1975's "92 in the Shade," the only picture directed by author Thomas McGuane, whose screenplay was based on his 1973 novel. Peter Fonda starred as a rival charter businessman embroiled in what escalates into a dangerous feud. The supporting cast featured Margot Kidder (McGuane's wife at the time), Elizabeth Ashley (with whom McGuane had a brief affair), Burgess Meredith, William Hickey, and Joe Spinell.

Reminiscing about working with Warren Oates in "92 in the Shade," Stanton said, "We had a scene together, and I went to Warren and said, 'I don't know what do with this scene, it makes no sense to me.' Warren said, 'Well, Harry Dean, just remember one thing. Whatever you do is right.' That was a very supportive and a very helpful thing. I never forgot it. It took a lot of pressure off of me as an actor. It was a very nourishing thing for him to say."

Harry Dean Stanton shares a scene with veteran movie tough guy
Joe Spinell in "92 in the Shade."

The fourth and final collaboration between Harry Dean Stanton and Monte Hellman was a head-scratching, only-for-the-money assignment. When Clint Eastwood's breakthrough spaghetti western "A Fistful of Dollars," which was made in 1964 but premiered in the U.S. three years later, was aired in 1975 on "The ABC Sunday Night Movie," the network deemed the premise of a lone, opportunistic gunfighter playing two rival border town gangs against each other for monetary gain too violent and amoral for broadcast viewers.

So the network hired Monte Hellman to direct a prelude, depicting Eastwood's character as a prisoner being offered a pardon in exchange for ridding the border town of San Miguel of its outlaw elements. Harry Dean Stanton (pictured below) portrayed the unidentified warden-lawman-politician who gives "Eastwood" - portrayed in only rear camera shots by an unnamed actor and in stock closeups of Clint's squinting eyes - the opportunity for redemption. The footage has since thankfully vanished in subsequent TV showings of the movie, while, years later, Stanton had no memory of the experience.

Harry Dean Stanton first sang on screen as a chain-gang convict in 1967's "Cool Hand Luke," accompanying himself on guitar during a soulful rendition of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" as Luke (Paul Newman) bids a sardonic farewell to his dying mother (pictured below). He also taught Newman the song that the star sings to himself while plucking a banjo: "I don't care if it rains or freezes, 'long as I got my plastic Jesus sittin' on the dashboard of my car."

In 1988, Harry Dean told the Los Angeles Times that he "began singing before I could even talk." Adept on guitar, harmonica, and drums, he had an impressive singing voice, having toured with a male choir in his youth. "I could have made it as a singer, but I went with acting, surrendering to it, in a way." Later in life, he formed his own Tex-Mex band, initially called Harry Dean Stanton and the Repo Men, later the Harry Dean Stanton Band.

It was only natural that actors of his ilk would be obligated to appear in the mandated biker flick, and so 1968 found Harry Dean Stanton playing a character called "Spook" (pictured below) in the ludicrously titled "The Mini-Skirt Mob," featuring "hog straddling females on the prowl" on Honda bikes, playing "around with murder like they play around with men," and starring Jeremy Slate, a staple in biker cinema (notably as the alpha thug in the first "Billy Jack" feature "The Born Losers").

We're told that these are really motorcycles, not bicycles,
in "The Mini-Skirt Mob."

In 1970, Stanton portrayed a biker with a penchant for wearing suits ("Let the wardrobe play the character") in "The Rebel Rousers," costarring biker flick icon Bruce Dern, alongside real-life wife and mother of actress Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, and Jack Nicholson, in the most ridiculous pants in biker film history, as "Bunny" (pictured below).

Jack Nicholson rides a 1945 Flathead Harley Bobber
in "The Rebel Rousers." Harry Dean Stanton is the
nattily attired biker on the far right.

Jack Nicholson remained a lifelong friend of Stanton. Harry Dean was best man at Jack's 1962 wedding to actress Sandra Knight, who starred opposite her husband as a spectral seductress in director Roger Corman's low-budget horror flick "The Terror," with Boris Karloff. After the couple divorced in 1968, Nicholson and Stanton were roommates for a couple of years in the Hollywood Hills.

Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson, pictured here in their
later years, appeared in, all total, seven films together.

In 1970, Harry Dean Stanton fit nicely into the ensemble cast of the men-on-a-mission war comedy "Kelly's Heroes," featuring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland, Carroll O'Connor, and Gavin McLeod. One memorable scene finds Rickles (as Crapgame) and Stanton (as Willard) reconnoitering the side streets of a French village behind enemy lines when they accidentally fall into a collapsed outhouse. As they rejoin the squad, one of the GIs, a down-home ol' son named Cowboy, screws up his nose and drawls, "You boys smell like you fell into a dung heap." Rickles snidely replies, "It kind of makes you homesick, don't it?" to which Stanton, with a smirk, admits to Cowboy, "It does, kind of, doesn't it, old buddy?"

Willard (Harry Dean Stanton) and Crapgame (Don Rickles)
are about to take the plunge in "Kelly's Heroes."

"Cisco Pike" (1972) found Kris Kristofferson in his screen debut, as a down-on-his-luck folk-rock musician and former drug dealer blackmailed by a crooked cop (Gene Hackman) into selling a large haul of confiscated marijuana. In his first major film, Kristofferson was praised by Roger Ebert for "the easy, informal kind of acting control that works in the movies."

Karen Black, the quintessential victimized woman in '70s cinema (see "Five Easy Pieces," "Drive, He Said," "The Day of the Locust"), portrayed Cisco's put-upon girlfriend (pictured above), while Harry Dean Stanton played Cisco's oblivion-destined friend and erstwhile fellow musician, who, in the words of Roger Ebert, "has short-circuited his mind with heroin and defeatism." As played by Stanton, Ebert noted, "the character lives and resonates."

Harry Dean Stanton took credit for urging Kristofferson into taking
on the starring role in "Cisco Pike." "He's a sweetheart," Stanton
said of Kristofferson, "and a great poet, too."

Upon its release, "Cisco Pike" had trouble finding an audience, but it has since become a cult favorite among fans of Kris Kristofferson and of Tex-Mex musician Doug Sahm, who has a supporting role in a cast that also included Roscoe Lee Browne, Andy Warhol superstar Viva, and the wondrously named Joy Bang.

Some 44 years later, 90-year-old Harry Dean Stanton accompanied
Kris Kristofferson at an October 2016 celebration for Stanton.

When Stanton appeared in a small role in director Sam Peckinpah's 1973 western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," he was finally credited as Harry Dean Stanton. The film reunited him with Kris Kristofferson, cast as Billy to James Coburn's Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Harry Dean Stanton watches a conversation between Kris
Kristofferson and Emilio Fernandez (best known as the corrupt
General Mapache in Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch").

Stanton forged a friendship with Bob Dylan during the filming of "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." They ended up driving together from the Mexican location to Kansas City. "We jammed together quite a bit," Stanton recalled. In Dylan's epic, nearly four-hour fever dream of cinema titled "Renaldo and Clara" (1978), co-written by Dylan and actor-playwright Sam Shepard and directed by Bob himself, Harry Dean Stanton appeared in a cast that included Dylan's wife, Sara Dylan, Joan Baez, and Ronnie Bakley.

Harry Dean Stanton poses with a camera-shy Bob Dylan.

John Milius, the director of "The Wind and the Lion," "Big Wednesday," "Conan the Barbarian," and, among others, "Red Dawn," made his directing debut with 1973's "Dillinger," a fanciful biopic (from a script by Milius) of America's first Public Enemy No. 1, with Warren Oates in the title role. Dillinger's partners in crime were played by an array of scene-stealing character actors, including Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter, Geoffrey Lewis as Harry Pierpont, John P. Ryan as Charles Mackley, Steve Kanaly as Pretty Boy Floyd, and Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson ("Dillinger" was released one month before "American Graffiti").

"Dillinger" stars Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Geoffrey Lewis,
and John P. Ryan pose for a publicity photo.

"Dillinger" featured Ben Johnson as G-Man Melvin Purvis, singer Michelle Phillips as Dillinger's Menominee Native American girlfriend, and Cloris Leachman as "The Lady in Red." As Homer Van Meter, who met an inglorious end in a hail of so many machine gun rounds that his kin surmised he was used for "target practice," Stanton wryly utters an oft-used catchphrase: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."

A little over a decade after "Dillinger," Harry Dean Stanton worked with John Milius again, in 1984's "Red Dawn" - you know, the movie about Russian and Cuban-Nicaraguan troops invading the U.S. and how a roving band of high school athletes called the Wolverines save democracy. Stanton appears as the father of brothers Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, a beaten and bloodied detainee in a Russian re-education camp (pictured below). He makes the most of his brief screen time, managing to bellow the film's most quotable line: "Boys, avenge me! AVENGE ME!"

If you blinked, you might have missed Stanton as "FBI Man #1" in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 crime epic "The Godfather Part II" (pictured below). He plays one of two federal agents guarding Mob capo Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), who is in custody as a government witness testifying against the Corleone family. "There are no small parts," Stanton joked. "You know that old saying...there are only small actors."

In answer to your question, "FBI Man # 2" was played by James
Murdock, sometimes billed by his birth name, David Baker, a little-
known actor who passed away from pneumonia age 50 in 1981.

Coppola gave Harry Dean Stanton a meatier role in the film that bankrupted the director, 1982's "One from the Heart," which amounted to not much more than a boy-loses-girl / boy-gets-girl romantic comedy (at least that's what the critics called it, although there is very little to laugh about here), starring Frederic Forrest as a junkyard auto mechanic and Teri Garr as a travel agency employee, with Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia. When Coppola insisted on recreating the story's Las Vegas setting completely on the sound stages of his Zoetrope Studios with lavish sets and detailed miniatures, the original $15 million budget ballooned to $28 million. In the U.S. alone, the movie grossed only $636,000.

The "$28 million working-class fantasia," as one reviewer put it, cast Harry Dean Stanton as the seedy owner of the junkyard, singled out by Roger Ebert as one of the picture's "small pleasures," although the critic regretted that "Coppola resists showing us Stanton's most effective tool, his expressive eyes."

"One from the Heart" costars Frederic Forrest and
Harry Dean Stanton sport ill-advised hairdos.

Francis Ford Coppola directed Harry Dean Stanton one more time, on an episode of the '80s Showtime series "Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre." In March 1987, Stanton played Rip Van Winkle in a cast that featured Ed Begley Jr., Tim Conway, Chris Penn, John P. Ryan, Talia Shire, and Sofia Coppola.

In 1976, Harry Dean Stanton reunited with his "Ride in the Whirlwind" costar Jack Nicholson in the revisionist western "The Missouri Breaks," scripted by the aforementioned Thomas McGuane ("92 in the Shade") and directed by Hollywood iconoclast Arthur Penn (best known for "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man"). Mega-salaried superstars Nicholson and Marlon Brando portrayed frontier archenemies, one (Jack) a laid-back rustler, the other (Marlon) a wigged-out Sharps rifle-armed regulator.

The outlaw gang in "The Missouri Breaks" consists of
(seated) Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, (standing)
Frederic Forrest, John P. Ryan, Harry Dean Stanton.

Nicholson was paid $1 million and a percentage for ten weeks' work, while Brando received $1.25 million plus a percentage for five weeks, prompting Jack to often quip on the set, "Another day, another twenty grand." Rolling Stone magazine staffer Chris Hodenfield was inspired to write, "'The Missouri Breaks' was not a movie. It was a business proposition."

Harry Dean Stanton accompanies an off-camera prairie singalong
with Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, and costar Kathleen Lloyd.

In the mid-1970s, Harry Dean Stanton made guest appearances on the syndicated soap opera satire "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," which starred Louise Lasser. Stanton portrayed Jake Walters, a creepy photographer who abducts Mary's friend, Loretta Haggers (played by Emmy Award-winning Mary Kay Place), who has amnesia.

Thirty years after "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," Mary Kay Place was cast as wife #6 of Harry Dean Stanton's character of "Prophet" Roman Grant, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon compound in the acclaimed HBO series "Big Love" (pictured below).

Harry Dean Stanton's first words to director Ridley Scott during his audition for "Alien" (1979) were, "I don't like science-fiction or horror movies." Scott was amused and said, according to Stanton, "I don't either, actually, but I think can something of this one." He reassured Stanton that the movie would be a thriller like And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" mystery in which an assemblage of guests are killed one by one. That's sort of what happens in "Alien."

As Brett, the engineering technician aboard the deep space tug Nostromo, "Stanton," according to Rolling Stone magazine, "plays him as familiar and endearing a presence as that crusty but friendly regular at your local diner."

Harry Dean Stanton, looking casual in his Hawaiian shirt, stands
beside "Alien" cast mates Ian Holm, John Hurt, Veronica
Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Yaphet Kotto, and
Jonesy the cat (actually, four ginger cats played Jonesy).

Harry Dean Stanton found himself in another sci-fi picture when he was cast as Harold Hellman, aka "Brain," in "Escape from New York," co-written and directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plisskin, a snarling, one-eyed soldier-turned-convict with a hissing voice borrowed from Clint Eastwood who is coerced into rescuing the kidnapped President of the United States.

Rolling Stone magazine: "And damned if he and Adrienne Barbeau
don't look good together." Sometimes the character actor gets the
girl: Adrienne Barbeau plays Brain's woman, Maggie. At the time,
Barbeau was married to director John Carpenter.

Incidentally, most of the New York locations in "Escape" were actually filmed in St. Louis, Missouri. (In response to one critic's complaint that New York City's Broadway is not a four-lane street, Kurt Russell, on the DVD commentary, responded, "I was concerned with looking cool in a '64 station wagon.")

Stanton showed a flair for deadpan comedy as Dr. Ludwig in 1982's "Young Doctors in Love," an "Airplane!"-style spoof of daytime medical soap operas, featuring Sean Young and "Spinal Tap's" Michael McKean, that was the feature film debut for director Garry Marshall (best known for "Pretty Woman"). "I like comedy," Stanton said, "I like doing comedy."

Dr. Ludwig (Harry Dean Stanton): "There are more than 20 vital
bodily fluids, and I am proud to say I have tasted every one of them."

The year 1984 provided Harry Dean Stanton with an unforeseen epiphany. First, he played Bud, a veteran auto repossessor who takes Emilio Estevez under his wing in the punk UFO comedy "Repo Man," executive produced by Michael Nesmith, The Monkee's erstwhile "Woolhat." Written and directed by independent British filmmaker Alex Cox, the quirky pretzel-twist on sci-fi paradigms rapidly became a cult hit. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it "a neo-Surreal, southern California fable...At its end, there's nothing less than an ascension to heaven in a 1964 Chevy Malibu."

"Repo Man's" Bud: "Look at those assholes.
Ordinary f***in' people, I hate 'em."

And then, Harry Dean Stanton was handed the role of a lifetime in "Paris, Texas," directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Specifically written for him by screenwriter Sam Shepard, he portrayed an amnesiac who mysteriously wanders out of a south Texas desert after a four-year absence and awkwardly reconnects with his brother and his son. With the boy in tow, the drifter sets out on a road trip through the Southwest to track down his long-missing wife, a peep-show stripper played by Nastassja Kinski.

The role of Stanton's seven-year-old son was played by a worldly
Hunter Carson, son of actress Karen Black and writer-director
L.M. Kit Carson, who adapted Sam Shepard's screenplay.

"Sam (Shepard) and I got drunk," Stanton recalled, "we were drinking tequila, listening to a Mexican singer in Santa Fe." Stanton told The New York Times, "I was telling him I was sick of the roles I was playing. I told him I wanted to play something of some beauty or sensitivity. I had no inkling he was considering me for the lead in his movie."

A flashback in "Paris, Texas" reveals a happier past for
Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski,

In a 2002 retrospective on "Paris, Texas," Roger Ebert noted, "Stanton has long inhabited the darker corners of American noir, with his lean face and hungry eyes, and here he creates a sad poetry." Stanton himself said, "After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play. If I never did another film after 'Paris, Texas,' I'd be happy."

In a 1986 interview for the Los Angeles Times, Harry Dean Stanton commented, "There's always a stigma attached to those terms: 'character actor,' 'supporting player.' It bothers every actor, whether they admit it or not. I guess I've always resented the fact that you have your humanity taken away by only playing a sidekick role." He said, "It's just frustrating when you're in a supporting role because you only get to express a part of yourself." Once referring to himself as "a very late bloomer," he told the Times, "I would've preferred to blossom earlier in life. I think every actor wants to play those big parts." On the other hand, he also once said he never wanted to be a leading man: "Too much work."

With his roles in "Repo Man" and "Paris, Texas," the enduring actor blossomed into full cult-movie star mode.

In 1986, in what must be regarded as his most normal role, Stanton portrayed Molly Ringwald's unemployed father in "Pretty in Pink," written and executive produced by John Hughes, the cinematic guru of teen angst in the '80s who directed "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," and, among others, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Rolling Stone magazine declared, "The moment when he surprises
his kid with a prom dress is one of the most emotional and painfully
real in any Hughes film

Among the fascinatingly anomalous cast assembled for director Martin Scorsese's underrated 1988 masterpiece "The Last Temptation of Christ" - Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Verna Bloom as Mary, Jesus' mother, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate - was Harry Dean Stanton as Saul of Tarsus, later the Apostle Paul (pictured below).

It was also in 1988 that Harry Dean Stanton had his first experience working with director David Lynch, the unique mind behind the film "Blue Velvet" and the TV series "Twin Peaks." "The French as Seen by..." was a French-produced collection of five short films contributed by such notable directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, and David Lynch. Lynch's offering, "The Cowboy and the Frenchman," cast Stanton as Slim, a grizzled, hard-of-hearing rancher in the turn-of-the-20th century West. Comedy ensues when Slim and his two not-so-bright saddle pals encounter a non-English speaking Frenchman. Jack Nance (best known as the star of David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and as lumberjack Pete Martel on Lynch's "Twin Peaks") and Tracey Walter (who played Blinky the sound effects technician on the short-lived David Lynch-Mark Frost 1992 sitcom "On the Air") played the slangy cowpokes, while Michael Horse (familiar to "Twin Peaks" fans as Deputy Hawk) appeared as a singing Native American. "The Cowboy and the Frenchman" (pictured below) is included in the DVD "The Short Films of David Lynch."

Allegedly, David Lynch had earlier wanted Stanton to portray Frank Booth, the gas-inhaling psychopath in "Blue Velvet," but the actor turned him down. "I just didn't want to deal with it because of all the violence," Stanton said. Coincidentally, Stanton claimed he was, as well, approached for the role of Shooter, the alcoholic father played by Hopper in "Hoosiers," with Gene Hackman, which, Stanton admitted, "I should've done, but they gave that to Dennis, too." By the way, director Alex Cox originally wanted Dennis Hopper for Stanton's part in "Repo Man," but Hopper wanted too much money.

Nicolas Cage channeled the spirit of Elvis Presley as Sailor, an ex-con on the run with girlfriend Lulu Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) from assorted weirdos hired by Lulu's harpy of a mother (played by Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd) to kill him in writer-director David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (1990), a lurid, violent, over-the-top melodrama that also features Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini, and "Twin Peaks" cast members Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Grace Zabriskie. Harry Dean Stanton was cast as private detective Johnnie Farragut, who also happens to be the on again-off again boyfriend of Lulu's mother.

Harry Dean Stanton is threatened by David Patrick Kelly, Calvin
Lockhart, and Grace Zabriskie in "Wild at Heart."

In David Lynch's theatrical prequel to the "Twin Peaks," 1992 "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me," a new resident in the Washington state community was Carl Rodd, the world-weary manager of Fat Trout Trailer Park, played by Stanton. Overall, critics were not kind to Lynch's brainstorm to revisit "the world of 'Twin Peaks,'" as he put it. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Lynch's taste for brain-dead grotesque has lost its novelty." USA Today called it "a morbidly joyless affair." The Times' Vincent Canby noted, "It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be."

Stanton's Carl Rodd also appeared in five episodes of the new Mark Frost-David Lynch "Twin Peaks" series in 2017, set in the town 25 years after the original series.

Original "Twin Peaks" costar Mädchen Amick joins Harry Dean
Stanton in the 2017 version of "Twin Peaks."

In 1993, David Lynch and Monty Montgomery (co-producer of "Wild at Heart") created a three-part anthology series for HBO titled "Hotel Room," each story set in the same room at the fictitious Railroad Hotel in New York City. Lynch directed two episodes, including one featuring Harry Dean Stanton and the late Glenne Headly (best known as the con woman who out-cons Michael Caine and Steve Martin in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels").

An atypically gentle film from David Lynch, 1999's "The Straight Story," based on real events, featured a delightfully sweet performance by veteran stuntman-turned-actor Richard Farnsworth as an elderly man who travels 288 miles from Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion in Wisconsin on a riding lawnmower to visit his estranged older brother, whom he has learned suffered a stroke. Sissy Spacek appeared as Farnsworth's daughter, and, in a small role at movie's end, Harry Dean Stanton portrayed the ailing brother.

"The Straight Story" costars Harry Dean Stanton and Richard
Farnsworth share a laugh at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.
A few months later, Farnsworth, who had been painfully enduring
metastatic prostate cancer, committed suicide at his ranch.

The year 2006 saw the release of "Inland Empire," a three-hour picture that took David Lynch, who distributed it himself, two-and-a-half years to complete. Laura Dern stars as an actress preparing for a role in a film that turns to be the remake of a long-ago movie left unfinished due to the murders of its stars. Things become increasingly surreal as the actress starts assuming the personality of the character she's playing and her life itself begins to mimic the movie-within-the-movie. Like Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," which, according to The New York Times' Manohla Dargis, "this film resembles like an evil twin, 'Inland Empire' involves an attractive blond actress who tumbles down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes inside rabbit holes."

The typically eclectic cast assembled for "Inland Empire" included Jeremy Irons, Julia Ormond, Diane Ladd, Grace Zabriskie, Mary Steenburgen, William H. Macy, Nastassja Kinski, and Harry Dean Stanton as the panhandling assistant to the director (Irons) of the film-in-a-film (pictured below, with Laura Dern).

David Lynch's final working experience with Harry Dean Stanton came with an acting role in Stanton's final film, "Lucky," in 2017, which was the directing debut of John Carroll Lynch (no relation to David), a character actor best known for his portrayals of Frances McDormand's husband, Norm Gunderson, in the Coen brothers' "Fargo," John Wayne Gacy (Twisty the Clown) on the FX series "American Horror Story," and one of the McDonald brothers in "The Founder."

David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton share a scene in "Lucky."

In October 2016, Vidiots Foundation, a non-profit film organization and library, established the first annual Harry Dean Stanton Award, during which David Lynch bestowed the inaugural award upon the namesake himself. "It seems like everybody loves Harry Dean!" Lynch beamed from the stage. "I sure love Harry Dean! I love Harry Dean as a person. I love Harry Dean as a singer-musician, and I love him as an actor."

In 1997, possibly stemming from his longstanding friendship with Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton found himself cast in a Steven Seagal eco-action picture titled "Fire Down Below," which pitted environmentally-conscious EPA agent Seagal against toxic waste-spewing coal mining baron Kristofferson. The countrified take on Seagal's aikido recruited a number of country singers and folksy rockers, including Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, Marty Stuart, Levon Helm, and Mark Collie.

To be honest, in his later years, Harry Dean Stanton had to be
reminded that he was even in a Steven Seagal picture.

In 1998's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Stanton, a longtime friend of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. was cast in a cameo as a judge in a hallucinatory scene (pictured below) in filmmaker Terry Gilliam's feverish adaptation of Thompson's seemingly unfilmable chronicle of his "savage journey to the heart of the American Dream," featuring Johnny Depp as Hunter.

Benicio del Toro portrayed Hunter's traveling companion, Dr. Gonzo, in a diverse cast that included Tobey Maguire, Ellen Barkin, Gary Busey, Christina Ricci, Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Katharine Helmond, Michael Jeter, Penn Jillette, Lyle Lovett, Flea, Christopher Meloni, Verne Troyer, Laraine Newman, and Tim Thomerson.

Hunter S. Thompson died from a self-inflicted gunshot in February 2005 at the age of 67. Johnny Depp funded Thompson's $3 million funeral, which was marked by the writer's ashes being fired from a cannon atop a specially constructed 153-foot tower. Harry Dean Stanton was supposed to sing "Danny Boy"  at the private service.

Depp befriended Stanton, whom he adulated, and performed onstage with the actor and Kris Kristofferson at the aforementioned Harry Dean Stanton Award ceremony in October 2016 (pictured below).

Johnny Depp (far right) gushed about Stanton,
"This is the finest gentleman that ever survived!"

In the 2011 3D computer-animated western "Rango," featuring Johnny Depp as the chameleon of the title, Stanton provided the voice of a blind, bank-robbing mole named Balthazar (pictured below).

In 1999's "The Green Mile," a sprawling, three-plus-hour adaptation of six serialized paperbacks by Stephen King starring Tom Hanks and directed by Frank Darabont, who had adapted King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption for the screen as "The Shawshank Redemption" and developed "The Walking Dead" series, Harry Dean Stanton enjoyed a grimly amusing role as Toot-Toot, an aging prison trustee who elicits gallows humor as the stand-in, or, more properly, sit-in for
electric chair execution run-throughs.

"The Green Mile" director Frank Darabont discusses a scene with
Tom Hanks as Harry Dean Stanton and Barry Pepper look on.
The name of actor Barry Pepper's character as a cell block guard
was Dean Stanton.

As mentioned earlier, Harry Dean Stanton had a recurring role from 2006 to 2010 on the HBO series "Big Love," as Roman Grant, the self-anointed Prophet and patriarch of the Mormon Juniper Creek compound ...until he was smothered to death with a pillow. After his character's demise. Stanton joked that the show had generated more responses than anything else he had done, "except for a couple hundred other movies."

A pair of actors sadly no longer among us:
"Big Love" costars Bill Paxton and
Harry Dean Stanton

In the 2012 Marvels Cinematic Universe film "The Avengers," Stanton had a cameo as a security guard in a scene with Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / The Hulk (pictured below). "I don't know how I ended up in that," Stanton recalled."I assume they called me. But...they cut part of my scene out of that, which pisses me off."

Harry Dean Stanton asks Mark Ruffalo, "Are you an alien?"

The next year, Stanton appeared in the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Johnny Knoxville action picture "The Last Stand," directed by South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon. "I played a farmer," Stanton noted. "I think I'm on a tractor or something, and I get shot."

Harry Dean Stanton's final movie role, in 2017's "Lucky," as a world-weary atheist facing mortality, has been equally lauded as a fitting epitaph for the long-revered actor and an apt companion piece to the film that elevated him to the stratosphere of cult stardom, "Paris, Texas."

Two lost figures in an unforgiving landscape: Travis Henderson
in "Paris, Texas" and Lucky in "Lucky."

The supporting cast for "Lucky" included David Lynch (no relation to director to John Carroll Lynch), Ron Livingston (best known for his role as Peter in "Office Space"), Ed Begley Jr., and Tom Skerritt.

Rolling Stone magazine posited, "How does a 90-year-old atheist face the final chapters of life's novel?...It's impossible not to consider Lucky as an extension of the actor's personality, making his eventual enlightenment and sense of satisfaction over a life well-lived a poignant, fitting farewell to the star."

In an obituary for Stanton, Los Angeles Times writer Josh Rottenberg called the actor's Lucky "a role that clearly paralleled his own life." Contemplating his own demise in a 2013 interview in The New Yorker, Stanton noted, "When you're deep asleep and not dreaming, where the f*** are you? There's total blackness, it's nothing...So I'm hoping that's what death is, that it's all gonna go. I don't want to deal with any consciousness afterward."

Stanton once stated that his religious philosophy was "closer to Taoism or Zen Buddhism, because it's the most practical." He said, "I've read a lot of stuff on Eastern philosophy...and the real Jewish Kabbalah...The real Kabbalah is the same thing as Taoism and Buddhism, really." He also admitted, "I can't relate to the Judaic-Christian concept at all. It's a fascistic concept...All fear-based, all about there being a boss, someone in charge, a creator."

In a 2010 documentary, Stanton said, "We think we have free will and choice. That's  bull****. It's an illusion...It's insane. Everything just happens...There is no answer. There never was an answer, there'll never be an answer. That's the answer."

"There's nothing pretty or movie star-looking about him," Kris Kristofferson remarked. "He has a lean and hungry look." In 1978, The New York Times' Vincent Canby saw Stanton's "mysterious gift" as the ability "to be able to make everything he does seem immediately authentic." Roger Ebert noted that Stanton was one of two character actors (the other being M. Emmet Walsh) whose presence in a movie guaranteed that it could not be "altogether bad."

It was a lucky coincidence for Roger Ebert when Harry Dean
Stanton and M. Emmet Walsh were both in the same movie,
1978's "Straight Time," starring Dustin Hoffman.

There were two documentaries made about the actor, "Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland" in 2011 and "Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction" in 2012. The latter features clips from several of his performances, interviews with David Lynch, Sam Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, singer (and onetime girlfriend) Deborah Harry, and "Paris, Texas" director Wim Wenders, along with rambling musings, inconclusive thoughts ("After a few years of doing it, you get tired of talking about yourself"), and poignant songs by Stanton.

On her 1989 album "Def, Dumb & Blonde," Deborah Harry,
best known as the lead singer of the new wave band Blondie,
recorded a hit song that celebrated Stanton, "I Want That Man,"
written by two members of the pop group Thompson Twins.
The song contains the lyric, "I wanna dance with Harry Dean."

Sophie Huber, the director of "Partly Fiction," commented, "Harry is a walking contradiction. He has this pride in appearing to not have to work hard to be good. He definitely does not want to be seen to be trying." If Stanton ever had a motto, he claimed it would be: "To be a fine actor, one should never put on an act, never onscreen or off.

The earlier, more satisfying documentary, "Crossing Mulholland," was directed by Tom Thurman, who made the 2006 documentary "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film." Narrated by Kris Kristofferson, the 2011 documentary includes intimate insights by Billy Bob Thornton (who starred in a brooding drama titled "Chrystal" in 2006, costarring Harry Dean Stanton), singer Michelle Phillips (a close friend of Stanton who appeared with him in "Dillinger"), "Escape from New York" director John Carpenter, musician Billy Swan, critic Leonard Maltin, and Richard Dreyfuss (who played Baby Face Nelson to Stanton's Homer Van Meter in "Dillinger").

Longtime friends Harry Dean Stanton and Michelle Phillips
attend a movie premiere in 1986.

Thurman's documentary made a point of Stanton's solitude. "I live alone," he said. "I like it that way. It's good for me." With a laugh, he added, "And for others, too, probably." He resided in a house on Mulholland Drive with a doormat that read, "Welcome UFOs." He once stated, "I feel very nomadic, like a warrior or a hunter. It's always been a big conflict for me to settle down and have a family or put down roots. My body is my home. I'd rather spend my life searching. Settling down would be a death to me."

Stanton never married but had a long relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay (pictured below), whom he referred to as "the love of my life." In "Partly Fiction," he said, "She left me for Tom Cruise."

On occasion, Stanton would also admit to a onetime affection for his "Paris, Texas" costar, Nastassja Kinski (pictured below), but then who wouldn't?

After Harry Dean Stanton died, David Lynch commented on Twitter, "The great Harry Dean Stanton has left us...There's nobody like Harry Dean. Everybody loved him. And with good reason. He was a great actor (actually beyond great) and a great human being - so great to be around him!!! You are really going to be missed, Harry Dean!!! Loads of luck to you wherever you are now!!!"

In "Partly Fiction," David Lynch (seated beside Harry Dean in
Stanton's home) asked Stanton how he hoped his legacy would
be remembered. Stanton replied, "It doesn't matter."

The Last Word

Actor Dabney Coleman, a longtime friend of Harry Dean Stanton (they were costars in "Young Doctors in Love" and appeared on the same episodes of "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman"), said, "Everybody, for some reason, wanted Harry Dean's approval - whether it was professional or just social, whether you were shooting the shit or trying to solve a scene and make it work. That was part of his magic, his mystique...they respected his acting, the way he approached things, his patience, his wisdom."

Pals Clarence Williams III, Dabney Coleman, and Harry Dean
Stanton gather outside Dan Tana's, a trendy West Hollywood
eatery where Harry Dean often held court.

Coleman recalled, "We saw each other often at Dan Tana's. They had a little spontaneous get-together the night he passed, and it was nothing more than a few of his friends got the idea that everybody would meet for a so-long drink, and it was packed with all of his close friends. No one who was close to him was not there."