Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton is a critically acclaimed American actor. He is also a musician and a singer, with a career that has spanned over sixty years. He is not a Hollywood superstar, but is considered by many as an original Hollywood actor. His weather-beaten, drooping appearance and superb acting talent have won the heart of critics, throughout his long career.

Stanton was born in Irvine, Kentucky, to Sheridan Harry Stanton, a tobacco farmer, and Ersel Stanton, a hairdresser. He had a very rough childhood, as he said that his parents never got along, and his mother resented him as a child and used to frighten him using a black sock. He bonded with his mother in her late years and they got really close.

He went to school at Lafayette High School, and later attended the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he studied radio arts and journalism and took up dramatics under UK theater icon, Wallace Briggs. It was Wallace Briggs who encouraged him to drop out of the University and pursue his dream of becoming an actor. Later, he moved to Los Angeles and attended the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California.

He is also a World War II World War II is a Malayalam information TV show on >> Read More... veteran of the United States Navy; he served as a cook aboard a Landing Ship, Tank during the Battle of Okinawa. He is the eldest of his siblings; having two brothers, Archie and Ralph, and a half-brother, Stan. Stanton’s family had a musical background, which might have been his reason for taking up singing at an early age, and facing a dilemma, of becoming an actor or a singer. He took up acting so that he could do both of them.

In the initial years of his career, he had an uncredited role in Gregory Peck’s, Pork Chop Hill, as a complaining rifleman in 1959. He again played a minor part in 1962's How The West Was Won, as the henchmen of Charlie Gant, and he followed that with an eye-catching, yet small role in 1963, as a poetry-reciting beatnik in Danny Kaye’s, The Man from the Diner's Club.

He mostly appeared in indie and cult films; playing a crazy and cunning scientist in Escape from New York Click to look into! >> Read More... ; a gay hitchhiker in Two-Lane Blacktop; and the character of repo man in ‘Repoman’. Later, he added many mainstream Hollywood productions to his credit, including Pretty in Pink, The Godfather II, ‘ Alien Click to look into! >> Read More... ’, Cool Hand Luke, Red Dawn Click to look into! >> Read More... , The Green Mile and ‘Christine’.

He is a close friend of Francis Ford Coppola Francis Ford Coppola is a director, screenwriter, >> Read More... . Hollywood legends like David Lynch David Lynch is a renowned American film director, >> Read More... , John Milius, Sam Peckinpah, and Monte Hellman have proclaimed him as their favorite actor.

His breakthrough came with the lead role in director Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, with Stanton rating the movie as his favorite. Scriptwriter, Sam Shepard, spotted Stanton at a bar in 1983, while both were attending a film festival in New Mexico, and the two fell into conversation. Stanton told Shepard that he was sick of roles he was playing and added that he wanted to play something of sensitivity or beauty. After some time, Shepard phoned Stanton in Los Angeles to offer him the part of the protagonist, Travis, a role that required the actor to remain silent and express pain as a lost and broken soul trying to put his life back together.

Stanton was the favorite of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, who often said that "no movie featuring either M. Emmet Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton in a supporting role can be altogether bad."

He has a bunch of television credits to his name, including four appearances on the network's, ‘Rawhide’, and eight on CBS', ‘Gunsmoke’, and, a cameo as himself on Two and a Half Men. He played Henry in an episode of Adam-12. He has been featured as Roman Grant, the manipulative leader of a polygamous sect in Big Love.

Stanton’s love for music has made him occasionally tour nightclubs as a singer/guitarist.

In 2011, the Lexington Film League organized a festival to honor Stanton in his native city. Harry Dean Stanton Film Festival was held for the second time over a weekend in May 2012, in downtown Lexington. The festival’s co-producer, Lucy Jones, visited Stanton in California and filmed the greeting for the festival.

He made a cameo appearance in the 2012 blockbuster, The Avengers Click to look into! >> Read More... , and in the action comedy movie - Seven Psychopaths Click to look into! >> Read More... . He also had a minor role in the action film, The Last Stand.

Stanton was the subject of the documentary - Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, directed by Sophie Huber, featuring Stanton's singing, and also interviews with collaborators, including Shepard, Wenders, David Lynch and Kris Kristofferson.

The 3rd Stanton festival in Lexington included an appearance by Crispin Glover Crispin Hellion Glover is an American actor. He is >> Read More... , a co-star with Stanton in ‘Twister’, Wild at Heart, and the Lynch-directed series, Hotel Room in 1993.