Actor Dean Stockwell, known from “Blue Velvet” and “Paris, Texas”, has died at the age of 85.
Well, maybe you don’t automatically associate the name with great Hollywood glamor. But the actor Dean Stockwell was one of those brave men from the second row, without whom the film industry just doesn’t work. He played smaller and larger roles in various classics. He shot “Paris, Texas” with Wim Wenders, “Blue Velvet” and “Dune” with David Lynch.
These were his most famous films, made in the 1980s. Even so, he had a long career in the film business behind him. Stockwell, born in 1936, was born in North Hollywood. So geographically, he didn’t have far to go to film, and neither was he in terms of age: he became a child star in the mid-1940s. The legendary MGM film studio signed him after a scout saw him in a theater performance. Musicals and comedies such as “Urlaub in Hollywood” (1945) and “The Song of the Thin Man” (1947) were both his drama school and his playground.
One of his most famous appearances: Dean Stockwell in 1986 in “Blue Velvet”.
(Photo: Imago)
Did the early fame and hustle and bustle harm him? “I started in this business very young,” he said in an interview, “and most of you are probably familiar with these stories about people who started young and then had a very difficult life. Sure, it wasn’t always easy – but what life is easy? “
Maybe out of self-protection, maybe because he didn’t want to miss anything when his generation was making history, Stockwell took a long break in front of the camera anyway. When he got to the age when others finally started working in the 1960s, he stopped and disappeared a bit into the hippie scene, befriended Neil Young and Dennis Hopper.
Then he returned to film, did a lot in the cinema and on television, appeared in “Columbo” and “The Streets of San Francisco”, and later in “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica”. With Wolfgang Petersen he made “Air Force One” (1997) and with Jonathan Demme “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004). Dean Stockwell died on November 7th at the age of 85.