Harry Dean Stands Down.

[Gerontophile]

Mr Harry Dean Stanton has died at the age of 91.

I am totally surprised he made it this long, but it's still sad.

[WOM]

He's in the new Twin Peaks. Just last night ... and I mean, just last night ... I said to Mrs WOM, "Wow. He was in 16 candles over 30 years ago, and he looked old back then. Apparently he's over 90." And today he's gone. Apparently smoked and drank like a champ, too.

[Lang Spoon]

Aw, nuts.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Crap!

However his best performance (IMHO) was St Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ so I figure he's got a warm welcome coming from somebody.

[Sits]

Wonderfully menacing for an octogenarian, in Big Love.

RIP

[Nocturnal Submission]

He came on as a guest performer at a Ry Cooder concert that I went to years back and croacked his way though a couple of songs. Bloody awful.

Liked his films and his acting style though.

RIP.

[Snake Plissken]

RIP Harold "Brain" Helman.

It always was just you, me and Fresno Bob.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

RIP. He was great in Paris, Texas.

[Nefertiti2]

Agreed. Lovely cameo in The Straight Story, too.David Lynch was lovely about him on the radio this morning. A great actor and great human being.

[Benjm]

RIP. He was great in Paris, Texas.

That has always been the film I associate him with, partly bound up with entering my teens around the time it came out, my interest in non-mainstream culture intensifying then and having access to a video recorder. I'd never actually noticed him in Godfather Part II despite multiple viewings.

[Cal Alamein]

Well, on the off chance that some of you haven't seen the obvious HDS film (the first one that got my attention when it first came out) here's a clip of him in pure REPO MAN sleaze.

[RobM]

He came on as a guest performer at a Ry Cooder concert that I went to years back and croacked his way though a couple of songs. Bloody awful.

Liked his films and his acting style though.

RIP.

Can't talk for that particular moment but I love this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=lBSidn2tNEo

[RobM]

Agreed. Lovely cameo in The Straight Story, too.David Lynch was lovely about him on the radio this morning. A great actor and great human being.

I'd love it if anybody said something approaching that about me when I shuffle off, nice, simple and heart-felt.

[evilC]

I'm very late to this thread. Partly because I assumed someone would have said what I'm going to and partly because what *has* been said is probably sufficient anyway. However...

He's always been one of my favourite actors. You can tell he's acting ...but only just. You're always left wondering just where he ends and the character begins. And that's great - because you know *he* exists, so why, then, shouldn't the character he seems so close to being also exist? That's what being understated as an actor can do.

I suppose it's also part of the reason that - as I've said elsewhere in the last few days, and said on this board previously - the 'second booth scene' in 'Paris, Texas' is possibly the most moving I've ever seen in film. (Although the '23rd psalm scene' in 'The Elephant Man' is alongside it.)

And here it is:

"I knew these people..."

You can imagine other good actors in that role if you like: Harrison Ford, Robert Forster, Al Pacino... but none of them would have been able to achieve that same sense of 'selflessness' - of sacrificing their own ego and being a blank canvas subsumed to the role and not being a partial, recognisable reflection of the actor themselves - to the same degree that Stanton achieved.

My first (and only long-term) girlfriend and I watched the film together. It of course reduced me to tears and, in the days following, she said to me "You think you're him, don't you?". While that was possibly hyperbole, it wasn't necessarily harsh or inaccurate. For a generation of young men struggling with reaching emotional maturity (if not biological maturity) in the mid-80s, it was an iconic performance. And Peter Bradshaw, in his obituary in The Guardian perhaps summates why, in a simple phrase: "painful masculinity". Yes, it's that old klaxon of 'self-hating <whatever>' but 'Paris, Texas' was entirely about regret, hating what you'd done or become and seeking redemption ...even if what you've done along the way isn't particularly noble (check the scene where Anne discovers Travis has abducted Hunter). But the final scene - Travis silhoutted against a setting sun before driving off somewhere - perhaps shows the film to be one long, drawn-out suicide note. Say what you like, but there's always that subtext to the final scenes.

Perhaps ironically, then, Stanton went on to live well beyond the age I assumed he would (and just beyond the age of both my parents, who also smoked quite heavily at points in their lives). I saw him on UK TV (the 'Jonathan Ross Show'?) in the late 80s or early 90s and - while he was obviously drunk, making for an awkward spectacle - I assumed that his seeming frailty, even then, was a bad portent and that he had possibly only months left. But I was very wrong, I'm happy to say.

"...He was kinda raggety and wild..."

[Amor de Cosmos]

Nice one Clive.