Harry Dean Stanton, Character Actor Who Became a Star, Dies at 91
Vincent Canby wrote in in 1978 that Mr. Stanton’s “mysterious gift” was “to be able to make everything he does seem immediately authentic.” The critic Roger Ebert once wrote
that Mr. Stanton was one of two character actors (the other was M. Emmet Walsh) whose presence in a movie guaranteed that it could not be “altogether bad.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
If there was any remaining doubt about his newly attained star status, it was eliminated in 1986 when he was invited to host “Saturday Night Live.”
Mr. Stanton was never anonymous again, although he continued to make his contributions almost entirely in supporting roles.