(Publicity photographs from "Rebel Without a Cause" show Hopper reading Stanislavski's "An Actor Prepares" on the set, which can only have been Dean's idea.) After Dean's death, Hopper abandoned Hollywood for Manhattan and spent five years studying under Strasberg. He needed to know what it felt like.Īlong with Marlon Brando, Dean was one of the principal vectors for the transmission of Strasberg's "Method acting" approach into the Hollywood mainstream, and Hopper became an eager disciple. It was completely from another planet." Dean explained that Jim Stark, his alienated teenage character, had spent a lot of time on that carpet and was intimately familiar with it. "Here was this kid, Jimmy - I mean, he was older than me, but he was still a kid," Hopper said, "and the stuff he was doing was amazing, it just blew me away." (I won't pretend these are verbatim quotes this is the conversation as I recall it.) He remembered Dean rolling around on the carpet of the set that was supposed to be the Stark family's Los Angeles home. Then he got on the set of "Rebel Without a Cause" (his film debut) and met Dean, who had been studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors' Studio in New York. Hopper had begun acting in television at a time when it was all about clarity and economy, he explained: You hit your mark, you said your lines clearly, you made your exit. He became intensely earnest, explaining that Dean had changed his approach to acting and to life. When I asked Hopper what he remembered most about James Dean, with whom he appeared in "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant," his demeanor changed. At some point his female companion - I'm not going to try to figure out who that was, and it doesn't matter - stalked off after some heated private conversation, but he didn't seem concerned. He wore a white linen suit and a trim goatee, regaled us with yarns from his heyday as a "total madman" in the 1960s, and looked terrific against what I remember as a crisp, sunny day. On the one occasion when I met Hopper, at a film-festival party in San Francisco about 15 years ago, he gave a vintage performance, drinking wine and laughing it up with a group of people he barely knew (or, in my case, didn't know at all).
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Even when he performed in children's TV or straight-to-video Eurothrillers or the 1993 film version of "Super Mario Bros.," you always had the feeling that Hopper was performing a kind of existential high-wire act, perhaps more for himself than the audience: How much of his own soulful madness would he let out? How much of the inanity and mediocrity around him would he absorb?
Hopper appeared in a handful of memorable films - "Apocalypse Now," "The American Friend" and "Blue Velvet," along with his own "Easy Rider" - and a seemingly infinite litany of forgettable ones. I'm inclined to believe that all the roles Hopper played across 74 years of life and more than 50 years of moviemaking were aspects of his acting career, of his passionate interest in the mysterious fusion of being, imagining and pretending that allows you to be yourself and someone else at the same time. Bush Republican and then an Obama voter), he was an actor. Before Dennis Hopper, who died Saturday of prostate cancer, became a rebel filmmaker or a generational symbol or a legendary debauchee or a Hollywood aesthete and Renaissance man (or a George W.
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