From a child actor at MGM to his most famous role in "Quantum Code", including Lynch and Wenders, he left his mark on American cinema with his strangeness. He died Sunday at the age of 85.
Saturnine face, low gaze, wrinkle
d forehead and thick eyebrows: Dean Stockwell was a sure bet to inoculate his dose of fishy in any scene - with the probable climax of his out of nowhere playback of In Dreams by Roy Orbison in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). Gangster diva palot and makeup, he melted Dennis Hopper. This supporting role of the 80s and 90s had also appeared with Wim Wenders or during the five seasons of the series Code Quantum (1989-1993), tree hiding the forest of a long Hollywood career, started at the age of 9 years. . Because the one who played the son of a demon in Horror at will (1970, lukewarm adaptation of Lovecraft) was the mouth of an angel of a child actor, propelled by his parents themselves actors (in the family post-synchro department, not necessarily distant from Lynch, his father Harry was the voice of Prince Charming in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937).
Make oneself cry
Dean Stockwell was taken under contract by MGM and made his debut alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the musical Stopover in Hollywood (1945). Little Dean's specialty is lacrimal: his ritual question before making a film was "should I cry there?" and often it is. He doesn't really like it, nor the job. On Elia Kazan's Invisible Wall (1947), the filmmaker uses the Actors Studio method to bring tears to the young Stockwell. “Think of a dying puppy,” he told her. The child prefers, once the filmmaker has his back turned, to irritate his eyes to make him cry. His most notable role from this period is that of Joseph Losey's Boy with Green Hair (1948), a parable of racism and intolerance where Stockwell therefore has green hair - not a dye, but an expensive wig made from hair. of French women. It’s one of the few positive experiences for young Stockwell, especially because he feels like he’s making an important film.
He took a break in 1952 to concentrate on his studies, dropped out of Berkeley University after a year because he was unhappy, escaped military service and the Korean War (he took drugs before going for the medical examination) and wanders through seasonal jobs (harvesting fruit, planting railroad tracks). He ended up resuming shootings for small and big screen relentlessly, including The Greatness of Forgiveness (1961), an anti-militarist episode of the Fourth Dimension and among the most personal of its creator Rod Serling. He played a sociopathic assassin in Richard Fleischer's Le Génie du Mal (1959), in competition at Cannes, where he won a performance prize shared with Orson Welles.
- Hologram
After a break in the mid-1960s to immerse himself in the counter-culture (sex, meditation and drugs), alongside Neil Young in particular, Stockwell returned to work with the most salient film The Last Movie (1971) by Dennis Hopper. where he plays a different kind of "child": Billy the Kid. His first meeting with David Lynch was devilishly Lynchian, just before joining the cast of Dune (1984): “I call him on the phone and the first thing he says to me is' I would like to apologize if I behaved strangely the very first time we saw each other but I thought you were dead ””: Lynch had mistaken him for another deceased child actor. For Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), Stockwell was hired by his pal Harry Dean Stanton, convinced that the actor could play his brother. Seeing the rushes, Stockwell cries - this time, for real -, convinced that the film, future Palme d'Or, will be a disaster ("Harry told me that we looked like prisoners of war in the pictures" ). Hollywood offers him recognition with his only Oscar nomination, as a supporting role in the crime comedy Widow But Not Too Much (1988) by Jonathan Demme. His favorite role, according to him, as a suave mafia a little too clingy to Michelle Pfeiffer. Then, it will be mainly SF on TV (Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica), with especially Quantum Code: he composed a libidinous, sarcastic soldier, with flashy vests and the eternal cigar (which he also wore in the life), best friend and guide of the hero who leaps from era to era and to whom he appeared like a hologram. Dean Stockwell passed away in his sleep on Sunday at the age of 85. In Dreams, we hope.
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