Dennis Hopper dies aged 74

Dennis Hopper, the high-flying Hollywood wild man whose memorable and erratic career included an early turn in Rebel Without a Cause, an improbable smash with Easy Rider and a classic character role in Blue Velvet, has died aged 74.
Hopper died on Saturday at his home in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, surrounded by family and friends, family friend Alex Hitz said. Hopper's manager announced in October 2009 that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The success of Easy Rider, and the spectacular failure of his next film, The Last Movie, fitted the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favourites as Apocalypse Now and Hoosiers. He was a two-time Academy Award nominee, and in March this year was honoured with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.
After a promising start that included roles in two James Dean films, Hopper's acting career languished as he developed a reputation for throwing tantrums and abusing alcohol and drugs. On the set of True Grit, Hopper so angered John Wayne that the star reportedly chased Hopper with a loaded gun.
He married five times and led a dramatic life right to the end. In January 2010, Hopper filed to end his 14-year marriage to Victoria Hopper, who stated in court filings that the actor was seeking to cut her out of her inheritance, a claim Hopper denied.
"Much of Hollywood," wrote critic-historian David Thomson, "found Hopper a pain in the neck."
All was forgiven, at least for a moment, when he collaborated with another struggling actor, Peter Fonda, on a script about two pot-smoking, drug-dealing hippies on a motorcycle trip through the US southwest and south to take in the New Orleans Mardi Gras.
On the way, Hopper and Fonda befriend a drunken young lawyer (Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper had resisted casting, in a breakout role), but arouse the enmity of southern rednecks and are murdered before they can return home.
"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 $US380,000 ($447,428). It went on to gross $US40 million ($47.1 million) worldwide, a substantial sum for its time. The film caught on despite tension between Hopper and Fonda and between Hopper and the original choice for Nicholson's part, Rip Torn, who quit after a bitter argument with the director.
The film was a hit at Cannes, netted a best-screenplay Oscar nomination for Hopper, Fonda and Terry Southern, and has since been listed on the American Film Institute's ranking of the top 100 American films. The establishment gave official blessing in 1998 when Easy Rider was included in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Its success prompted studio heads to schedule a new kind of movie: low cost, with inventive photography and themes about a young, restive baby boom generation. With Hopper hailed as a brilliant filmmaker, Universal Pictures lavished $US850,000 ($1.0 million) on his next project, The Last Movie.
The title was prescient. Hopper took a large cast and crew to a village in Peru to film the tale of a Peruvian tribe corrupted by a movie company. Trouble on the set developed almost immediately, as Peruvian authorities pestered the company, drug-induced orgies were reported and Hopper seemed out of control.
When he finally completed filming, he retired to his home in Taos, New Mexico, to piece together the film, a process that took almost a year, in part because he was using psychedelic drugs for editing inspiration.
When it was released, The Last Movie was such a crashing failure that it made Hopper unwanted in Hollywood for a decade. At the same time, his drug and alcohol use was increasing to the point where he was said to be consuming as much as four litres of rum a day.
Shunned by the Hollywood studios, he found work in European films that were rarely seen in the United States. But, again, he made a remarkable comeback, starting with a memorable performance as a drugged-out journalist in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, a spectacularly long and troubled film to shoot. Hopper was drugged-out off camera, too, and his rambling chatter was worked into the final cut.
He went on to appear in several films in the early 1980s, including the well regarded Rumble Fish and The Osterman Weekend, as well as the campy My Science Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
But alcohol and drugs continued to interfere with his work. Treatment at a detox clinic helped him stop drinking but he still used cocaine, and at one point he became so hallucinatory that he was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles hospital.
Upon his release, Hopper joined Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drugs and launched yet another comeback. It began in 1986 when he played an alcoholic ex-basketball star in Hoosiers, which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
His role as a wild druggie in Blue Velvet, also in 1986, won him more acclaim, and years later the character wound up No 36 on the AFI's list of top 50 movie villains.
He returned to directing, with Colors, The Hot Spot and Chasers.
From that point on, Hopper maintained a frantic work pace, appearing in many forgettable movies and a few memorable ones, including the 1994 hit Speed, in which he played the maniacal plotter of a freeway disaster. In the 2000s, he was featured in the television series Crash and such films as Elegy and Hell Ride.
"Work is fun to me," he told a reporter in 1991. "All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job -- two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be."
For years he lived in the Los Angeles' bohemian beach community of Venice, in a house designed by acclaimed architect Frank Gehry.
In later years he picked up some income by becoming a pitchman for Ameriprise Financial, aiming ads at baby boomers looking ahead to retirement. His politics, like much of his life, were unpredictable. The old rebel contributed money to the Republican Party in recent years, but also voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008.
Dennis Lee Hopper was born in 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, and spent much of his youth on the nearby farm of his grandparents. He saw his first movie at five and became enthralled.
After moving to San Diego with his family, he played Shakespeare at the Old Globe Theatre.
Scouted by the studios, Hopper was under contract to Columbia until he insulted the boss, Harry Cohn. From there he went to Warner Bros, where he made Rebel Without a Cause and Giant with Dean while in his late teens.
Later, he moved to New York to study at the Actors Studio, where Dean had learned his craft.
Hopper's first wife was Brooke Hayward, the daughter of actress Margaret Sullavan and agent Leland Hayward, and author of the best-selling memoir Haywire. They had a daughter, Marin, before Hopper's drug-induced violence led to divorce after eight years.
His second marriage, to singer-actress Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, lasted only eight days.
A union with actress Daria Halprin also ended in divorce after they had a daughter, Ruthana. Hopper and his fourth wife, dancer Katherine LaNasa, had a son, Henry, before divorcing.
He married his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, who was 32 years his junior, in 1996, and they had a daughter, Galen Grier.

"Whatchu talkin' 'bout?" Gary Coleman dead at 42

Gary Coleman, the adorable, pint-sized child star of the smash 1970s TV sitcom Diff'rent Strokes who spent the rest of his life struggling on Hollywood's D-list, died on Friday after suffering a brain haemorrhage. He was 42.
Coleman was taken off life support and died with family and friends at his side, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Janet Frank said.
He suffered the brain haemorrhage on Wednesday at his Utah home. Frank said Coleman was hospitalised because of an accident at the home, but she had no further details.
Coleman's family, in a statement read by his brother-in-law Shawn Price, said information would be released shortly about his death.
Best remembered for Diff'rent Strokes character Arnold Jackson and his "Whatchu talkin' 'bout?" catchphrase, Coleman chafed at his permanent association with the show but also tried to capitalise on it through reality shows and other TV appearances.
His adult life was marked with legal, financial and health troubles, suicide attempts and even a 2003 run for California governor.
"I want to escape that legacy of Arnold Jackson," he told The New York Times during his gubernatorial run. "I'm someone more. It would be nice if the world thought of me as something more."
A statement from the family said he was conscious and lucid until midday on Thursday, when his condition worsened and he slipped into unconsciousness. Coleman was then placed on life support.
"It's unfortunate. It's a sad day," said Todd Bridges, who played Coleman's older brother, Willis, on Diff'rent Strokes.
Diff'rent Strokes debuted on NBC in 1978 and drew most of its laughs from Coleman, then a tiny 10-year-old with sparkling eyes and perfect comic timing.
He played the younger of two African-American brothers adopted by a wealthy white man. Race and class relations became topics on the show as much as the typical trials of growing up.
"He was the reason we were such a big hit," co-star Charlotte Rae, who played the family's housekeeper on the show, said in an email. "He was the centrepiece and we all surrounded him. He was absolutely enchanting, adorable, funny and filled with joy which he spread around to millions of people all over the world."
Diff'rent Strokes lasted six seasons on NBC and two on ABC; it lives on thanks to DVDs and YouTube. But its equally enduring legacy became the troubles in adulthood of its former child stars.
In 1989, Bridges was acquitted of attempted murder in the shooting of a drug dealer. The then 24-year-old Bridges testified he became depressed and turned to drugs after Diff'rent Strokes was cancelled.
Dana Plato, who played the boys' white, teenage sister, pleaded guilty in 1991 to a robbery charge. She died in 1999 of an overdose of painkiller and muscle relaxer. The medical examiner's office ruled the death a suicide.
"It's sad that I'm the last kid alive from the show," Bridges said.
Singer Janet Jackson, who appeared on several episodes of Diff'rent Strokes, tweeted that, "I want to remember him as the fun, playful, adorable and affectionate man he was. He has left a lasting legacy. I know he is finally at peace."
Coleman was born February 8, 1968, in Zion, Illinois, near Chicago.
His short stature added to his child-star charm but stemmed from a serious health problem, kidney failure. He got his first of at least two transplants at age five and required dialysis. Even as an adult, his height reached only 1.2 metres.
In a 1979 Los Angeles Times profile, his mother, Sue Coleman, said he had always been a ham. He acted in some commercials before he was signed by TAT, the production company that created Diff'rent Strokes.
After the show was cancelled, Coleman continued to get credits for TV guest shots and other small roles over the years, but he never regained more than a shadow of his old popularity. At one point he worked as a security guard.
Coleman's health problems went beyond kidney failure. Last autumn he had heart surgery complicated by pneumonia, said his Utah lawyer Randy Kester. In February, he suffered a seizure on the set of The Insider.
Legal disputes also dogged him. In 1989, when Coleman was 21, his mother filed a court request trying to gain control of her son's $6 million fortune, saying he was incapable of handling his affairs. He said the move "obviously stems from her frustration at not being able to control my life."
In a 1993 television interview, he said he had twice tried to kill himself by overdosing on pills.
He moved to Utah in 2005, and according to a tally in early 2010, officers were called to assist or intervene with Coleman more than 20 times in the following years. They included a call where Coleman said he had taken dozens of Oxycontin pills and "wanted to die."
Some of the disputes involved his wife, Shannon Price, whom he met on the set of the 2006 comedy Church Ball and married in 2007.
Coleman remained estranged from his parents, Sue and Willie Coleman, who said they learned about his hospitalisation and death from media reports.
Sue Coleman said she wanted to reconcile and had been patiently waiting for her son to be ready.
"One of the things that I had prayed for was that nothing like this would happen before we could sit with Gary and Shannon and say, 'We're here and we love you,"' Sue Coleman said. "We just didn't want to push him."
She would not discuss the cause of the estrangement.