Dennis Hopper, whose pot-addled Billy in Easy Rider and psychopathic Frank Booth in Blue Velvet helped put the icon in iconoclastic, has died after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer. He was 74.
The legendary actor died about 9 a.m. Saturday surrounded by family in his Los Angeles home.
Taken ill with flu-like symptoms last September, Hopper later said he was suffering with prostate cancer. Family members told PEOPLE that the disease had spread to other organs in his system.
Early Rebel Role
Born in Dodge City, Kansas – his father, Jay Hopper, reputedly was an intelligence officer in the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services, which explained his son’s peripatetic American upbringing – Hopper was 19 when he was cast in his very first movie opposite none other than James Dean: 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. Hopper played a character named “Goon.”
Known off-screen as a rabble-rouser and impossible when it came to taking direction, the young Method actor was soon virtually blacklisted from movies. Resorting to TV dramas and even moonlighting as a Vogue photographer, his turnaround came in 1969 when he joined forces with Peter Fonda, screenwriter Terry Southern and a then unknown B-movie actor named Jack Nicholson to costar in and direct a $400,000 road picture called Easy Rider.
The movie proved a box-office phenomenon, launched the youth movement in Hollywood and turned Hopper into a household name, though not necessary a bankable one. His next directorial effort, 1971’s The Last Movie, literally went up in pot smoke.
At the same time, his first marriage – to Hollywood princess Brooke Hayward (daughter of two legends, actress Margaret Sullavan and producer Leland Hayward) – flamed out, and Hopper would go on to marry (and divorce) four more times – including the singer-actress Michelle Phillips, to whom he was wed for nearly a week.
As far as children were concerned, the 1961-69 marriage to Hayward produced a daughter, Marin, now 47; with wife Daria Halprin (1972-76) he had a daughter Ruthanna, 35; and with Katherine LaNasa (1989-92), a son, Henry, 19.
Fighting convention to the very end, only last January, amid bitter claims about her out-of-control spending, a direly sick Hopper filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, whom he wed in 1996. The couple also had a daughter, Galen, born in 2003 and to whom Hopper was said to be devoted.
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