Hollywood star Hopper dies of cancer aged 74

DENNIS Hopper, who brought the counter culture to Hollywood with Easy Rider and led a career marked by successes, failures and comebacks, has died at the age of 74.

Hopper, who was twice nominated for Oscars and earned a star this year on the Walk of Fame, died on Saturday at his home in the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles, family friend Alex Hitz said. Hopper was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009.

“We rode the highways of America and changed the way movies were made in Hollywood,” Peter Fonda, his Easy Rider co-star, said in comments carried by several news outlets. “I was blessed by his passion and friendship.”

After a promising start that included roles in two James Dean films, Hopper’s acting career languished as he developed a reputation for tantrums and drug abuse.

All was forgiven when he collaborated with Fonda on a script about two pot- smoking, drug-dealing hippies on a cross-country motorcycle trip.

“Easy Rider was never a motorcycle movie to me,” Hopper said in 2009. “A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.”

Fonda produced Easy Rider and Hopper directed it for a meager $380,000. It went on to gross $40 million worldwide, a substantial sum for its time.

It was a hit at Cannes, netted a best screenplay Oscar nomination for Hopper, Fonda and Terry Southern.

In the 1980s steady use of drugs and alcohol led him into rehab and at one point a hospital’s psychiatric ward.

Upon his release, Hopper joined Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drugs and launched yet another comeback. In 1986, he played an alcoholic ex-basketball star in Hoosiers, and earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

His role as a wild drunk in Blue Velvet, also in 1986, won him more acclaim, and years later the character ranked No 36 on the AFI’s list of top 50 movie villains.

Hopper married five times. In January he filed to end his 14-year marriage to Victoria Hopper, who said in court filings that the actor was seeking to cut her out of her inheritance, a claim Hopper denied. He married Victoria 32 years his junior, in 1996.

Hopper maintained a frantic work pace in the last two decades of his life.