Harry Dean Stanton, the beloved character actor known for his beleaguered, grizzled aspect and his star turns in titles like Paris, Texas, Pretty in Pink, Repo Man, Cool Hand Luke, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks, died of natural causes on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 91 years old.
Stanton, who the famed film critic Roger Ebert once described as having “long inhabited the darker corners of American noir, with his lean face and hungry eyes”—and who referred to himself in the New York Times Magazine as a “late bloomer”—appeared in over 250 films, with his first significant part in the 1958 Michael Curtiz Western The Proud Rebel, appearing alongside Alan Ladd and Olivia de Havilland. He worked steadily—largely as cowboys and villains—ever since. Most recently, Stanton played a manipulative cult leader on HBO’s Big Love, and had small roles in The Avengers, Seven Psychopaths, and the HBO series Getting On. This year, he appeared in a few episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime, and starred in the feature film Lucky, which is scheduled for release this month.
“The great Harry Dean Stanton has left us,” his close friend and frequent collaborator David Lynch said in a statement on Friday. “There went a great one. There’s nobody like Harry Dean. Everyone loved him. And with good reason. He was a great actor (actually beyond great)—and a great human being—so great to be around him!!! You are really going to be missed Harry Dean!!! Loads of love to you wherever you are now!!!”
Stanton was the subject of a 2012 documentary, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction in which he described his spirituality this way: “I’m big into Eastern concepts. The horror of life, the love of children, the whole phantasmagoria—it’s all meaningless. Be still, and see what happens. All of life unfolds perfectly. You have to get beyond consciousness.”
In a 2013 interview with The New Yorker, Stanton said, “When you’re deep asleep and not dreaming, where the fuck are you? There’s total blackness, it’s nothing, right? So I’m hoping that’s what death is, that it’s all gonna go. I don’t want to deal with any consciousness afterward.” Stanton’s agent said that he will be survived by the “family and friends who loved him.”