Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton, the character actor with the world-weary face who carved out an exceptional career playing grizzled loners and colorful, offbeat characters in such films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man, has died. He was 91. Stanton was great pals with actor Jack Nicholson, and they roomed together in a Laurel Canyon house on Skyline Drive in the early 1960s. He and Nicholson caroused and worked together in Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976), Man Trouble (1992), The Pledge (2001) and Anger Management (2003). Stanton also became friends with Marlon Brando, another actor from Missouri Breaks, and they engaged in long phone calls for years before Brando’s death in 2004. Stanton bonded with Kris Kristofferson and recommended that his friend work with him in the title role of a former 1960s rock star on the downside in 1972’s Cisco Pike. (It was the country singer’s first leading role.) A year later, he befriended Bob Dylan during the difficult shoot for Sam Peckinpah’s somber western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Harry Dean Stanton was born on July 14, 1926, in West Irvine, Ky., a small tobacco-growing community. His father was a farmer and a barber, his mother a hairdresser. Following high school, Stanton served in the Navy as a cook on an ammunitions ship in the Pacific during World War II — he was in the Battle of Okinawa — then enrolled at the University of Kentucky to study journalism and radio arts. In 1949, Stanton hopped a Greyhound bus to California to enroll at the Pasadena Playhouse. He performed on L.A. stages and toured as a singer with a Baptist preacher and spent time in New York studying acting with Stella Adler. Except for a brief marriage, Stanton was a bachelor who in the Partly Fiction documentary spoke about the lost love of his life, actress Rebecca De Mornay. “She left me for Tom Cruise,” he says in the film. Deborah Harry, whom he also dated, recorded a 1989 song for him, “I Want That Man.” His agent said that Stanton "is survived by family and friends who loved him."