Actor Harry Dean Stanton dies at 91

Harry Dean Stanton was my favorite actor.

I’m not sure I can tell you why. It wasn’t a technique thing – even though I review movies for a living I don’t know enough about the various schools of acting to tell you if he was particularly good at this or that specific thing.

It was more his presence, a kind of otherworldly everyman, a little down on his luck probably (sometimes a lot down on his luck), rarely the center of attention but always, always, always worth your attention.

More than anything else, he was just so damn cool.

“There went a great one,” David Lynch said in a statement. “There’s nobody like Harry Dean. Everyone loved him.”

That’s true. He wasn’t a matinee idol – far from it. He was rarely a leading man. But that hangdog look and Sunday morning stubble commanded the screen, large or small, whenever he appeared on it.

Stanton, 91, died Friday in Los Angeles. The world is a little lesser for it.

Pick your part. He was in “Cool Hand Luke,” “Escape From New York,” plenty of films. “Alien,” of course. He played Roman Grant on HBO’s “Big Love,” a self-proclaimed prophet of a polygamist cult. That was a particularly juicy role, full of quiet but lethal menace. He elevated the show’s electricity every time he wandered into a scene.

He didn’t need his street cred validated, but if he had, he earned it by playing Bud in Alex Cox’s “Repo Man” in 1984, the rare cult film that really deserves the description. He’s a sort of sordid mentor to Emilio Estevez, teaching him how to repossess cars. (“The life of a repo man is always intense.”)

You wouldn’t exactly pick Stanton for a character in a John Hughes movie, but there he was in “Pretty in Pink,” perfect playing Molly Ringwald’s dad, somehow shattered by life.

Stanton played shattered well. Probably his best role was in Wim Winder’s 1984 film “Paris, Texas,” which finally landed him a leading role. He played Travis, who wanders in out of the desert after going missing for four years. He reunites with his son and his wife, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, a lot more difficult and, by the end, a lot more heartbreaking.

It was Stanton’s favorite film, which is no surprise. He’s terrific in it.

As we get older we see the things we like, our tastes, our favorites, fall in and out of favor. There’s always a newer, better model of everything just around the corner, ready to edge an old favorite out of pop-culture prominence.

That wasn’t the case with Stanton. For one thing, he wasn’t big enough to peak, not in a flavor-of-the-month kind of way. He was just steadily great, a treasure to those who appreciated what he could bring to a film or show (or to his band).

His was the kind of stature that isn’t marketed or advertised. It is simply earned, on the promise of a terrific performance every time, no matter how good the project around him.

The fleeting nature of fame makes it easy and almost always inaccurate to say things like this: There will never be another like him.

In this case, I’ll challenge that. There will never be another Harry Dean Stanton. But I’m sure glad that we had one at all. RIP.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.