After suffering for over a year from prostate cancer, Dennis Hopper has died at the age of 74. His death comes just two months after Hopper's final public appearance, at the dedication of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Hopper established a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy from his first role in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause, and made an indelible mark on the cinema of the late 1960s with Easy Rider, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His two most iconic roles may both be villains-- the oxygen-huffing obsessive Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, and the criminal mastermind in Speed. Recently Hopper was headlining the Starz series Crash, and put in supporting roles in two recent features, Swing Vote and Elegy.
An original until the very end, Hopper was an outspoken and devoted Republican who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I had the chance to interview him on Election Day of that year, when he told me about his reasons for casting his vote for the Democrat and plenty more as we talked about his role in Elegy. You can read that interview here. I'll be thinking about that conversation today as we all mark the passing of a legend.
