With characteristic grandiosity, Hopper compared his plight in Hollywood to that of Rembrandt: he turned to photography and painting, acting in bad films to pay his drug bills.Īnd his private life became predictably chaotic. He began turning up to film-pitch meetings tanked up and heavily armed, and was once again ostracised by Hollywood circles. By his own estimate, "I was doing half a gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine a day - and that wasn't getting high, that was just to keep going, man."
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Insisting on his own genius, he survived the 60s with TV work and small movie parts, but his career was resurrected in 1969 when he and Peter Fonda collaborated on Easy Rider.Īfter Easy Rider Hollywood was at Hopper's feet, but typically he soon blew his opportunity by disappearing to Peru to shoot a quixotic project called The Last Movie, which he spent a year editing and which was universally panned as a self-indulgent piece of nonsense.īy this stage Hopper had decamped to a compound in Taos, New Mexico, and begun a chaotic regimen involving drugs, alcohol and firearms. From Dean he took the template of how a young actor should behave, and by the late 1950s he had fallen out with practically every director he worked with and been dropped by Warners. He worked with Dean again on Giant, and when the young actor died in a car crash in 1955, Hopper was devastated.
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Hopper was in awe of Dean, his acting style and dismissive attitude towards directors. He proved a natural performer, and by the age of 18 had attracted the attention of Hollywood agents. Against his mother's express wishes, he began studying acting at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre. That ambition seemed unlikely amid the cornfields of Kansas, but things looked up for Dennis when he moved with his family to San Diego, California in his early teens. "I decided when I was very young," he later said, "when I first saw movies, that I wanted to be an actor." He had, by his own admission, "a terrible, terrible relationship" with his volatile mother, and sought solace from an early age in the local movie theatre. Peter Winkler's worthy and well-researched biography pays due attention to Hopper's achievements as actor and filmmaker, but it's the scandal that Winkler is really interested in, and Hopper's life was positively packed with it.ĭennis Lee Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1934, and spent his formative years in the rural Midwest. His early acting promise was constantly undermined by his obnoxiousness, and it was Hopper's chaotic personal life and bizarre outbursts that turned him into a countercultural icon. Over a 55-year career as a Hollywood celebrity, Hopper was as famous for his wild misbehaviour as anything he achieved on screen. He was still in the process of divorcing the woman when he died, an unseemly but fitting end to an extraordinary but ragged life. Their legal battle turned public, and seemed to be about money: he accused her of stealing $1.5m worth of his legendary modern American art collection, she accused him of trying to write her out of his will. Having been diagnosed with prostate cancer in October of 2009, Hopper filed for divorce from his fifth wife Victoria Duffy in January 2010, calling her "insane" and "inhuman". "It was a very expensive burn," he concludes.ĭennis Hopper, who died last year, ended his Hollywood life just as he had begun it - mired in chaos, at war with himself, his loved ones and the world.
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Natalie takes off her clothes, sits down in the champagne, starts screaming."Īccording to Hopper, the slightly acidic wine had burnt Wood's privates, and she was rushed to a nearby hospital.
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So Nick and I went and got all this champagne and we filled the bathtub full of champagne and we said 'Okay Natalie, we're ready for the orgy'. "I think she had heard that Jean Harlow or somebody had had a champagne bath. "She wanted to have an orgy," Hopper explained, "she just wanted all kinds of guys doin' her. Hopper, who was only 19, teamed up with his equally dissolute 17-year-old co-star Natalie one afternoon and they decided to have a party.
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In his new biography of the actor, Peter Winkler describes a bizarre encounter between Hopper and Natalie Wood, during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause. It would be hard to argue that Hollywood corrupted Dennis Hopper, because almost as soon as he got there he was up to no good.