Goodbye, Easy Rider!

Fuck and holy shit. Practically everyone expected it, but then it comes as a surprise. Today one of the really big ones left: Dennis Hopper! One of the most ingenious and difficult artists in Hollywood, who created the ultimate cult film of the hippie generation with the road movie Easy Rider, died today at the age of 74 in Los Angeles.

Over and over again in his life, Dennis Hopper had reached a point where he believed he was near death. The actor survived drug and alcohol excesses, he survived delusional illnesses, fights and career lows. He kept straightening up before he lost his last battle with prostate cancer yesterday, after more than nine years.

The actor, director and photographer was one of the most influential actors in New Hollywood and was born on May 17, 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas. In 18, aged 1954, he moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting and landed a start in 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955) and 'Giant' (1956) at the Page starring James Dean, Gaining a Foothold. Dean and Hopper were personal friends, but after Dean's death, Hopper's career faltered and the violent argument with film director Henry Hathaway was not exactly conducive to his career either, so Hopper was quickly considered extremely difficult in Hollywood. So he moved to New York and took classes at Lee Strasberg's renowned Actors Studio and also began working as a photographer.

His career only got going again in the second half of the 60s when he met Peter Fonda. The two quickly became friends and together they wrote the screenplay for the film “Easy Rider”, the story of two motorcycle freaks who smoke weed on their way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Hopper directed and starred, and that road movie started New Hollywood for a movie that cost less than $380 and made $000 million at the box office, a whopping sum at the time. A small independent movie showed it to the big Hollywood studios and Hopper became a star overnight. But like so many before him, the success didn't really do him any good and so the friendship between the two artists broke up over the dispute over authorship. There was also a dispute about the cast of the third role, the drunken lawyer: Hopper rejected the still unknown Jack Nicholson and wanted Rip Torn. However, after a bitter argument with the director, Hopper left the set and Hopper sank into a drug and alcohol haze after the film.

In the years that followed, Dennis was rarely seen in films. Francis Ford Coppola hired Hopper in Apocalypse Now, where Hopper played a demented photojournalist, a role that may have been true to his real life, and in Rumble Fish he played an alcoholic, a role he was seldom allowed to play in those years needed, since it corresponded to his life and after that it became quieter again around him until he made a brilliant comeback in David Lynch's disturbing "Blue Velvet" in 1986, as the psychopathic killer Frank Booth, who sadistically torments his environment and his sexual perversions lives out on a woman whose child he has kidnapped. Apparently, Hopper's reputation was so tarnished by the mid-'80s that there was no more credible cast for the role.

But Dennis Hopper has successfully fought his demons, as he explained in an interview with "Vanity Fair" in 2007: "I haven't taken any hard drugs or alcohol for 24 years," because in an interview with the US magazine "Parade » Hopper described his early years as: «I was a schizophrenic, paranoid, drugged drunk». Despite the successful rehab, Hopper continued to subscribe to Fieslinge when it came to his film roles. I will always remember him with his roles in Flashback, Speed, Hell Ride, Land of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Last Ride, Out of Season, The Last Days of Frankie the Fly, Convoy, Boiling Point , Space Truckers, Nails, Waterworld and above all True Romance, with the absolutely brilliant «Sicilian» scene:

so it looks

He had been married to his fifth wife Victoria Duffy since 1996 – the two were long considered a dream couple – until in January 2010 Hopper surprisingly filed for divorce after 14 years of marriage, on the grounds that “irreconcilable differences”. The couple have a daughter. Hopper is also the father of two other daughters and a son. And they didn't leave him alone in the last few hours in Venice, California near Los Angeles, and Denis was surrounded by family and close friends, a family confidant announced.

Rest in Peace Dennis Hopper. You were and are one of the very, very great. To find your peace And thank you for everything, you will be missing, but God loves the rebels!