Actor

Born: July 14, 1926;

Died: September 15, 2017

HARRY Dean Stanton, who has died aged 91, was an actor whose gaunt appearance and often taciturn manner improved every film he appeared in, though he had, until this year, only one real leading role and was never nominated for any major award.

Roger Ebert’s “Stanton-Walsh Rule” declared that no film that featured either him or M Emmet Walsh in a supporting role could be altogether bad (an opinion he revised after the dire 1989 teen comedy Dream a Little Dream). Another critic, David Thomson, thought Stanton “emblematic of sad films of action and travel. His face is like the road in the West.”

The leading role was as Travis Henderson in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984), a role for which he was recommended by its writer Sam Shepard, after the pair had got drunk together at a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Stanton had expressed the desire to play a romantic part. It was hardly a conventional romantic role: Travis hardly speaks throughout the film, and the actor was 58, while Nastassja Kinski, as his wife, was just 24. But the film was critically acclaimed, and Stanton, unshaven and clad in a dusty pinstripe suit and red baseball cap, was perfectly cast as a melancholy loner trying to make sense of his relationships.

He seemed, in any case, to have been a quirky, doleful, 58-year-old loner more or less from the beginning of his career and kept looking it right up till the end; his final role was as the lead in Lucky, released later this month, as a 90-year-old chain-smoking atheist, living in the desert and contemplating his imminent death.

In almost all of his many other films and television parts, Stanton was a supporting character, though he was often memorable. His particular highlights came in a bewildering range of films – as a singing convict in Cool Hand Luke (1967); an FBI man in The Godfather II (1974); a spacefaring trucker in Alien (1979); a father defying a Russian invasion in Red Dawn and an amphetamine-crazed car repossession man in Repo Man (both 1984); Molly Ringwald’s wastrel father in Pretty in Pink (1986) and St Paul in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Harry Dean Stanton was born on July 14, 1926 at West Irvine, Kentucky, the son of a tobacco farmer who also worked as a barber; his mother was a cook. It was a musical household; Stanton considered becoming a professional musician, and occasionally appeared in concerts later in his career. In 1989, he played harmonica on an album by the American rock group The Call.

He attended Lafayette High School in Lexington and then joined the US Navy, seeing service during the Second World War in the galley of a tank-landing ship during the Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious campaign in the Pacific. After demob in the rank of lieutenant, he attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington, where he studied journalism and began to act. Encouraged by his success on stage, he left university to train at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.

His first screen parts were on television in 1954; he was soon a fixture in background and minor roles in Westerns in particular; he was twice in Bonanza, four times in Rawhide, and appeared on Gunsmoke eight times. The theme continued on the big screen; his first films were Revolt at Fort Laramie and Tomahawk Trail (both 1957). He then appeared (uncredited) in the Korean War picture Pork Chop Hill (1959) and was one of Eli Wallach’s gang in How the West was Won (1962).

Soon recognised as one of cinema’s most dependable character actors, Stanton was seldom out of work thereafter, appearing in at least two or three films almost every year. Despite Ebert’s formulation, they were inevitably of variable quality, though the reason the Stanton-Walsh rule seemed plausible was that it had a good deal of truth in it. If Stanton’s appearance in a film was not always quite enough to redeem it, he was seldom anything other than watchable, and frequently brilliant.

It would take several pages to detail his work but, in addition to the films already mentioned, he was notable in the cult road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971); Dillinger and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (both 1973); opposite Jack Nicholson – to whom he had been Best Man in 1962 – in The Missouri Breaks (1976); in Bertrand Tavernier’s criminally under-rated Death Watch, which was filmed in Glasgow in 1979; the same year he was magnificent in John Huston’s equally under-rated Wise Blood and also put in appearances in Private Benjamin and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

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.

Stanton had a number of girlfriends, including a spell with the singer Debbie Harry and a long relationship with the actress Rebecca de Mornay, but never married.

ANDREW MCKIE