Harry Dean Stanton, Character Actor Who Became a Star, Dies at 91<br />Vincent Canby wrote in in 1978 that Mr. Stanton’s “mysterious gift” was “to be able to make everything he does seem immediately authentic.” The critic Roger Ebert once wrote<br />that Mr. Stanton was one of two character actors (the other was M. Emmet Walsh) whose presence in a movie guaranteed that it could not be “altogether bad.”<br />But he remained largely unknown to the general public until 1984, when the seemingly impossible, or at least<br />the unexpected, happened: Mr. Stanton, the quintessential supporting player, became a leading man.<br />Harry Dean Stanton, the gaunt, hollow-eyed, scene-stealing character actor who broke out of obscurity in his late 50s in two starring movie roles<br />and capped his career with an acclaimed characterization as a corrupt polygamist on the HBO series “Big Love,” died on Friday in Los Angeles.<br />Mr. Stanton — who was often billed as Dean Stanton early in his career to avoid confusion with another character actor, Harry Stanton<br />— made his first television appearance in 1954 in an episode of “Inner Sanctum,” a syndicated mystery and suspense anthology series.<br />That year he starred as a wandering amnesiac reunited with his family in Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival,<br />and as a fast-talking automobile thief training Emilio Estevez in the ways of his world in Alex Cox’s cult comedy “Repo Man.”<br />If there was any remaining doubt about his newly attained star status, it was eliminated in 1986 when he was invited to host “Saturday Night Live.”<br />Mr. Stanton was never anonymous again, although he continued to make his contributions almost entirely in supporting roles.
