Rue McClanahan, the actress known for her roles as the blowzy best friend Vivian on "Maude" and as the prowling Southern belle Blanche on "The Golden Girls," has died. She was 76.
Her manager, Barbara Lawrence, told CNN that she died at 1 a.m. Thursday at New York Presbyterian Hospital of a stroke. Her family was at her side.
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‘We blew it,’ said the actor and counterculture icon in his landmark Easy Rider. It was a prescient sentiment for a generation, but not for the intense man himself
Published on Sunday, May. 30, 2010 4:49PM EDT Last updated on Monday, May. 31, 2010 1:43AM EDT
News of the death of the legendary Dennis Hopper hit the wires Saturday like a light, lazy slap. “He was 74,” read one news site lede. Then, “Many expected this to happen.”
Oh well then. No big deal! When I heard last year that Hollywood’s hands-down biggest badass had prostate cancer, I thought death had finally met its match.
Since his debut in the 1950s – skulking around Rebel Without a Cause on-screen and having no-holds-barred sex with Natalie Wood off-screen – Hopper caused awe, apprehension and outright fear among those who knew him, and those who didn’t.
A gifted artist and actor, he is best known for his work in 1969’s Easy Rider, a hectic, deeply flawed, yet perfect rendering of the status of the American Dream.
In the film, he and Peter Fonda play modified cowboys (named Wyatt and Billy, tellingly enough): They are long-haired, low-riding bikers chasing freedom on the open road.
A brilliant American New Wave artifact, the film is ruthless in its deployment of violence and a relentless sense of anxiety that suggests freedom – both at this time in history and in its ideal – is ultimately the freedom from fear.
As the outlaws race toward their liberty it, of course, eludes them: Easy Rideris a small, agonizing epic that – in spite of its simplistic redneck versus hippie plot – suggests the good and the bad share culpability for the end of America’s innocence.
Wyatt famously says “We blew it” before he and Billy turn into roadkill, a tragic sentiment already long-enacted during the harrowing drug-sequence that explicates, so precisely, how all of the countercultural love and peace flowered, then collapsed into so many putrid fleurs du mal.
This is Dennis Hopper’s story also, told again and again. Handsome, affable and exceptionally talented, he – with a select group of artistic assassins, changed the very nature of cinema, and then, because of a combination of ego, excess and wild impatience with convention, he staggered his career. Passionate beyond belief, Hopper also loved women with such ferocity he terrified them: His marriage to a shell-shocked Michelle Phillips lasted nine nightmarish days.
The intensity of the man cannot be overstated – by the time he appeared in Apocalypse Now in 1979, playing a photojournalist/Shakespearean fool, a role for which he received tremendous acclaim, his stark raving, drug-loaded character seemed utterly autobiographical.
In this bleak, manic masterpiece, Hopper delivers his own – utterly appropriate – eulogy.
“What are they gonna say when, man, when he’s gone, huh?” he screams at the imprisoned, shrinking Martin Sheen. “That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man?”
Hopper’s character then categorically rejects such little homilies. As with the incalculable nature of freedom, Hopper’s legacy does not rest on either/ors.
Hopper was a great movie star: As a friend lamented, when you watched him, you knew that no one else could be him on the screen.
He was political, and deeply engaged in the contemporary art world, one of its greatest and most astute collectors.
He was a monster of frenetic energy (captured so well in 1986’s Blue Velvet), energy that assailed and allured us all.
When I think of this restive man, I remember his quietness in River’s Edge, made the same year as the more showy Lynch film, of his portrayal of a man so torridly lonely that he lives in the shadows with his love, an inflatable doll.
Anyone else would have made this characterization (consider Lars and the Real Girl) a self-consciously absurd, dark comedy.
Instead, Hopper, without flinching, let us look at what remained of this man’s broken heart.
Just two months ago, Hopper was awarded a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The event attracted great stars, for Hopper’s career – if peripatetic – never truly faltered. He was injured, having been duped by the paparazzi who yelled his name the day before, startling, then causing him to fall.
He asked that they try to be “more sensitive.”
It was a sweet moment, because he was so weak and so strong; because he glimmered, in that moment, with his whole being.
He is a man who walked a line for 74 years, straight through good and bad, stopping here, stopping there, but never resting.
Best of all, he never blew it either. That was fate, wresting away yet another of our sublime stars, fate that with no sensitivity comes, horribly, to call for each of us.
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