Hollywood screen legend, Dennis Hopper, known as one of Tinseltown’s most creative and versatile bad boys died Saturday from complications due to prostate cancer, a friend of the actor told Reuters. Hopper was 74.
The rebellious actor, best known for directing and starring in the 1969 cult classic “Easy Rider,” died at his suburban Los Angeles home at 8:15 am surrounded by family and friends.
Hopper had been an A-list staple of the biz during the entirety of his incredibly varied career that spanned more than half a century. Having appeared with this mentor James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant” in the mid 1950s and then having gone on to work with luminaries like Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola in “Apocalypse Now,” and David Lynch in “Blue Velvet,” Hopper managed to avoid getting typecast and built one of the most memorable and iconic personae in Hollywood history.
His is the recipient of two Oscar nominations; one for writing “Easy Rider” (with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern), and the other for his performance a tormented alcoholic high-school basketball coach in the 1986 underdog drama “Hoosiers.”
Hopper’s legacy was cemented early on in his career with the acclaimed counter-culture-celebrating road trip film, “Easy Rider,” which is today regarded as a landmark in American cinema. It came at a transitional time between the old Hollywood power structure and the emergence of the much edgier and experimental New Hollywood headed by young auteurs like Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
The low-budget experimental film is largely responsible for introducing sleepy mainstream audiences to an already thriving counter-culture marked by drugs, free love, communal living, long hair and the open road.
“We’d gone through the whole ’60s and nobody had made a film about anybody smoking grass without going out and killing a bunch of nurses,” Hopper told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. “I wanted ‘Easy Rider’ to be a time capsule for people about that period.”
Hopper is survived by four children.
