The actor, who died at the age of 85, began in the profession as a child and worked in films such as ‘Levando anclas’, ‘Impulso criminal’, ‘Paris, Texas’ and ‘Velvet azul’
Dean Stockwell was one of the few mortals who could boast a 70-year career in Hollywood. On
IMDB, the rigorous film database on the internet, appears as his first film ‘The Valley of Destiny’, a romantic drama with Greer Garson and Gregory Peck that the actor shot in 1945, when he was just nine years old. His filmography concludes in 2015 with the comedy ‘Entertainment’, his retirement from acting after suffering a heart attack. In between, two hundred films and series in which this supporting actor always shone for his magnetism and an unmistakable face. Last Sunday he died peacefully in his sleep from natural causes at the age of 85.
For the most veteran moviegoers, Dean Stockwell (Los Angeles, 1936) is the child of ‘Anchoring’, ‘Kim of India’ and ‘The boy with the green hair’. For those who were sentimentally formed in the 80s, the actor remains in the memory thanks to two roles in ‘Paris, Texas’, by Wim Wenders, and, above all, ‘Blue Velvet’, in which he sang in playback in a disturbing sequence with Dennis Hopper the song ‘In Dreams’, by Roy Orbison. He is remembered by current series viewers as Admiral Al Calavicci from ‘Through Time’ (Quantum Leap), a time travel series that ran from 1989 to 1993 and for which he won a Golden Globe.
Dean Stockwell was born in the Mecca of Cinema into a family of artists: his father was the actor and baritone Harry Stockwell, who voiced Prince Charming in the Disney movie ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. At the age of seven he was already performing on Broadway and at eleven, under contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer, he won a Golden Globe for his role in ‘The Invisible Barrier’. The following year he starred in ‘The Boy with Green Hair’, in which Joseph Losey made an anti-racist allegory and which caused the filmmaker to be in the crosshairs of Senator McCarthy, who encouraged the ‘witch hunt’. In Spain it could not be seen until 1975, when it was broadcast by TVE.
‘Lifting Anchors’, ‘The Demon of the Sea’ and ‘Kim of India’ are some of Stockwell’s youthful works, who in 1959 gave a giant boost to his career with Richard Fleischer’s ‘Criminal Impulse’, a thriller based on the real case of two college students from wealthy families who committed a murder for the sheer pleasure of doing it and in which he shared the screen with Orson Welles. The film won him the acting award at Cannes, an accolade that he would win again with Sidney Lumet’s “Long Journey into the Night,” an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s theatrical drama with Katharine Hepburn and Jason Robards leading the cast.
In the 60s and 70s, the actor combined popular television series such as ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Manix’, ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Colombo’, with transgressive films: ‘Passport to Madness’, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and the mythical ‘The Last Movie’ directed by his friend Dennis Hopper. Another good colleague, Harry Dean Stanton, partner in ‘Paris, Texas’, encouraged him to overcome his depression and to get out of hippie circles, convincing him to return to acting after a long depression. Already in the 80s, his name appears in the casts of ‘Dune’, ‘Living and dying in Los Angeles’,’ Stone gardens’, ‘Married with everyone’ – his only Oscar nomination – and ‘Tucker, a man and his dream’. In 1992 he was honored with the star of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Twice married and the father of two children, Dean Stockwell also had artistic concerns from which his friend Neil Young benefited. For him, he designed the cover of ‘American Stars’n’Bars’ and commissioned him to create the soundtrack of a film that he never made and that became one of the music’s best albums, ‘After the Gold Rush’. “I started at a very young age in this business and I’m sure most people have read stories about people who started as children and ended complicated lives that ended badly,” he said in an interview. “It is not the easiest life in the world, but no life is easy.”
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