Paris, Texas star Harry Dean Stanton has died
Harry Dean Stanton, who starred in films such as Paris, Texas (1984), Repo Man (1984) and Alien (1979) among others, died of natural causes Friday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 91 years old.
Stanton also appeared in David Lynch’s reboot of Twin Peaks, playing his beloved oddball character Carl Rodd. Stanton was a fixture in Lynch’s work, appearing in Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), the 1993 miniseries Hotel Room, The Straight Story (1999) and Inland Empire (2006).
Never one to pigeonhole himself, the actor played a convict, an FBI detective, and a polygamist offshoot leader over the course of his decades-long career. “Well, I realized early on that if I became an actor, I could play a writer and a sculptor and a painter and be all the things you just don’t have time to be in your lifetime. I could get to learn about all of them,” he told Interview‘s Ingrid Sischy in January 1991.
In his down time, Stanton played poker with John Huston (Anjelica’s father) and golfed with his friend Jack Nicholson, with whom he lived for a period in a Laurel Canyon house in the ’60s. “I was in a movie called Twister, and in it I had to hit a golf ball off of a roof with a driving wood,” Stanton said of learning the sport. “The guy who owned the place where we shot showed me how to do it, and I hit the ball about 150 yards. [In films is] when I first rode a motorcycle. And I learned how to ride horses in movies too.”
While he’ll always be remembered for his past oeuvre, he will still appear in one last film: Lucky, released on September 29. Read our January 1991 interview with Stanton here.
