Easy Rider director/star DENNIS HOPPER dead at 74 from prostate cancer.
The Hollywood hellion died today at his home at 815 AM surrounded by friend and family in Venice, California from complications from prostate cancer.
In a career spanning a half century, Hopper appeared in films as diverse and eclectic as Rebel Without a Cause, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Giant, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet and Speed.
Hopper received two Oscar noms – one for co-writing Easy Rider (with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern) and for his role as an the alcoholic basketball coach in Hoosiers.
"We’d gone through the whole ’60s and nobody had made a film about anybody smoking grass without going out and killing a bunch of nurses," Hopper said in an interview in 2005.
"I wanted ‘Easy Rider’ to be a time capsule for people about that period."
It WAS –launching the Hollywood new wave – a counter culture revolution in independent filmmaking outside the studio system, spawning a wave of imitators as iconic rebels went Jack Kerouac in search of a vanished American dream.
In the midst of his cancer diagnosis, Hopper was embroiled in a divorce battle with his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, over the estate of his art collection worth millions.
Among his marriages included an 8 day union with Mamas & Papas beauty Michelle Phillips who later told Vanity Fair she was subjected to “excruciating treatment” by the hotheaded Hopper.
Hopper was known for excesses both on and off screen. His notorious The Last Movie was a hell spawned shoot fueled with psychedlic drugs and booze.
Yet, Hopper was a connoisseur – not only of fine art — but of living AND loving to the extreme.
Adios, Amigo.
