The Life of a Character Actor is Always Intense

Another fave of mine gone... Harry Dean Stanton, perhaps the finest character actor in cinema history, has died at the age of ninety-one. Stanton's filmography, spanning seven decades is formidable, and Stanton was good in every film in which he acted. No less a film authority than Roger Ebert formulated a Stanton-Walsh rule: No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad. An exception was CHATTAHOOCHEE (1990), starring Walsh. Stanton's record is still intact.

Stanton managed to be ordinary-yet-distinctive looking... he was instantly recognizable, but looked like an everyman. He excelled at playing working stiffs, even a working-stiff-in-space (this is a rough scene, so if you're easily horrified, skip it, poor guy was a cat lover to boot):





The man also was a soulful crooner:





Here's a great video of him singing a duet with Art Garfunkel at a roast of Jack Nicholson, with some funny banter beforehand:





Stanton and Garfunkel... what a concept!

Stanton excelled at playing the laconic, competent straight man opposite various lunatics, whether a lipstick-smeared wicked mom in Wild at Heart:





Or a ranting conspiracy theorist in Paris, Texas:





Being a child of a certain age, my first exposure to Harry Dean Stanton, and the role that forever established my fandom, was his take on a world-weary car repossessor in Repo Man, the movie from which I took the post title:





While not an admirable character, Stanton's repo man did have a certain code of conduct:





By 1984, Harry Dean Stanton was often characterized as the world's greatest character actor, which I would not dispute:





David Lynch had a nice take on Harry's appeal:





At 91, he lived a good life, he was a character actor who managed to take on the status of a big star, the ordinary guy who, through his very ordinariness, achieved acclaim.

POSTSCRIPT: This appearance by Harry on David Letterman's show seems to have an allusion to a scene in Kelly's Heroes.