Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider Photo: ALAMY
Dennis Hopper, the American actor who was the epitome of a Hollywood hellraiser and starred most memorably in the cult classic Easy Rider, died at home in California yesterday, aged 74. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.
Even from his deathbed, the hard-living star made headlines as he sued for divorce from his fifth wife Victoria Duffy in a split that was as rancorous as it was typically tumultuous.
Hopper’s determination that Duffy, with whom he had a seven-year-old daughter, should not be his wife when he died was ultimately defeated by the ravages of the disease.
Hopper’s own life was every bit as colourful as the characters he portrayed on-screen. He was at the heart of Los Angeles’ party scene for two decades and frequently embarked on drug and drink binges before periodically checking himself in to rehab clinics.
His marriages included an eight-day union in 1970 with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, about which he later quipped: “The first seven were pretty good.” Phillips later told Vanity Fair that he had subjected her to “excruciating” treatment.
Hopper made his film debut alongside James Dean in 1955 in Rebel Without a Cause, but his name was forever associated with Easy Rider, the 1969 film he directed and co-wrote, and in which he starred alongside Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson.
The low-budget movie, originally conceived by Fonda, made a fortune at the box office and in subsequent video and DVD sales. It introduced mainstream moviegoers to cannabis-smoking, cocaine-dealing, long-haired bikers at a time when Hollywood had largely ignored the hippy counter-culture, which was thriving in Vietnam-obsessed America.
“We’d gone through the whole Sixties and nobody had made a film about anybody smoking grass without going out and killing a bunch of nurses,” Hopper told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. “I wanted Easy Rider to be a time capsule for people about that period.”
The film made a star of Nicholson, who at the time was unknown. Despite its success, it was not a harmonious set. Hopper clashed violently with everyone, and Fonda later described him as a “little fascist freak”. Their friendship did not survive the spat.
Nevertheless, the film won an award at Cannes, while Hopper was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
As an actor and director, Hopper never reached such heights again, although he went on to enjoy critical acclaim in Apocalypse Now (1979), playing a manic photojournalist, while in recent years he became known to younger audiences in the action movie Speed.
Against Hollywood typecasting, he was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Republican Party. “I’ve been a Republican since Reagan,” he once said in an interview. “I voted for Bush and his father. I don’t tell a lot of people, because I live in a city where somebody who voted for Bush is really an outcast.” However, at the most recent presidential election, his allegiance ended after Hopper voted for Barack Obama, reportedly because he didn’t like John McCain’s choice of running mate, Sarah Palin.
Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas, the son of Marjorie Mae and Jay Millard Hopper. After the war, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where the young Hopper attended Saturday art classes taught by Thomas Hart Benton.
At the age of 13, Hopper and his family moved to San Diego, where his mother worked as a lifeguard instructor and his father was a post office manager. Hopper later acknowledged that his father was also in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.
After high school he studied acting at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the Actors Studio in New York City with Lee Strasberg.
He followed Easy Rider with The Last Movie in 1971, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival but flopped at the box office. He later said the movie – the story of the impact a Hollywood movie company has on the inhabitants of a Peruvian village – was filmed during “one long sex and drug orgy”.
Hopper fell ill in September. He continued working almost to the end, both on his cable TV series Crash and on a book showcasing his photography. He had been working on a television production and helping to curate an upcoming exhibition of his own paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He was introduced to art by Vincent Price, the horror actor with whom he struck up a friendship.
Towards the end of his life, his fifth marriage fell apart. In an affidavit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, he claimed that Duffy “surreptitiously removed from my home very valuable personal property while I was extremely ill, refused to tell me where the property was when I asked her, and then left town”.
He estimated the missing art, including a portrait of himself by Andy Warhol and a work by Banksy, to be worth more than $1.5 million.
Duffy rejected the claim. “I removed my own property,” she said. “He is making a big deal about me removing things that are legally mine.”
Despite his illness, Hopper kept busy. With bandages to his forehead and hand, he attended the unveiling in March of his star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame surrounded by friends including Nicholson.
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