Image via University of Kentucky Press
Most moviegoers and television viewers never heard of Harry Dean Stanton but they saw him—hundreds of times. With his sullen features and scowling visage, he played the villain in dozens of westerns from “Gunsmoke” in the ‘60s through Pat Garret and Billy the Kid in the ‘70s. Stanton gained wider notice as the guitar-playing convict in Cool Hand Luke (1967). He played a hipster anti-hero in Repo Man (1984) and gained the star role in Paris, Texas (1984).
According to biographer Joseph B. Atkins in Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel, he was “a leading man in a character actor’s body.” Well, whatever his ambitions, Stanton spent most of his busy career as a character actor, dedicated to his craft and without prima donna affectations. Atkins chronicles a resume with few gap years.
Hollywood Rebel? Stanton drifted on the current called the “New Hollywood” along with onetime roommate Jack Nicholson and a parcel of actors who became stars. He was friends with the major figures to emerge from the ‘70s scene and moved Zelig-like amongst the LA music and movie milieu without attaining the acclaim of a Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda.
Zen? Stanton rebelled against the Protestant fundamentalism of his Kentucky upbringing and was known to his friends for a philosophical turn of mind. Like many bright lights of his generation, he was “an amalgam of Beat poetry, the writings of Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Arthur Schopenhauer, Buddhist and Zen wisdom, and I Ching and existentialism.”
Perhaps his self-reflection enabled Stanton, when given enough leeway, to endow even the most egregious villains with emotional complexity.
