Harry Dean Stanton Net Worth

Harry Dean Stanton's Quotes

• I've been rather like a cat. I'm finicky and I've done a lot of things, and made career choices, missed meetings and so forth that would have made me a much bigger actor, I think. But, by the same token, that would have demanded more of my time, too.
• [on his role in Paris, Texas (1984)] The whole film evolved on a very organic level. It almost had a documentary feel to it. It wasn't odd to be in the lead, I took the same approach as I would to any other part. I play myself as totally as I possibly can. My own Harry Dean Stanton act . . . I don't know whatever happened to Travis. I'd say . . . it's me. Still searching for liberation, or enlightenment, for lack of a better way to put it, and realizing that it might happen, it might not.
• I've always been a singer; it's not new to me. I've been singing since I was a child. I've always had a guitar and a harmonica and I played drums in high school -- in a marching band, anyway. I like different kinds of music and I'm exploring them: ballads, blues, blues-rock, country rock, whatever. I'm just focusing on singing a lot so I can get good at it. But don't say I play "country music." It's just another label, like "character actor." One term simply can't say it all.
• I'm a late bloomer. It's just a matter of how you evolve; of what your pace is. Hopefully, the older you get the more you grow. So, that has been my speed, the beat of my drum. I march to the beat of a different drum -- you'll pardon me for using this expression.
• Early on the whole point of acting was mostly getting a job and then the experience of doing it. But when I did Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) with Jack Nicholson in 1965 I discovered there was more to it than that. It was a key film for me because of that. Jack told me not to do anything, just let the wardrobe do the acting. It was a great revelation that became an acting principle. To be rather than to do. You have to behave on screen as much as you do in real life. You don't kill anyone in life, but you understand the anger that may bring it about.

Interesting Facts about Harry Dean Stanton

1. Prior to 1971, he was credited in films and on TV as Dean Stanton so as to avoid any confusion with character actor Harry Stanton, both of whom would appear together in a 1969 episode of Petticoat Junction (1963). Harry Dean Stanton later co-starred in The Green Mile (1999), which has a character named Dean Stanton.
2. Was tied up and pistol-whipped at his home in L.A. after a robbery. The thieves then took off in the actor's car, but were soon apprehended after the car was traced by a tracking device. Stanton suffered only minor injuries. [January 1996]
3. Had a small role as a jail guard in the 1978 Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong film Up in Smoke (1978), but his scenes were cut.
4. Critic Roger Ebert so admires him that he created the "Stanton-Walsh Rule," which states that "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad." Ebert later admitted that Dream a Little Dream (1989), in which Stanton appeared, was a "clear violation" of this rule.
5. Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 45th Venice International Film Festival in 1988.
6. Stanton has been named as a favorite actor by characters in novels by Elmore Leonard. Skip Gibbs, a serial bomber in the novel Freaky Deaky, watches Straight Time (1978) because Stanton is his favorite actor. Two characters in Leonard's novel Maximum Bob chat about how much the novel's title character resembles Stanton, an actor they both admire. Stanton did not appear in the Maximum Bob (1998) TV series, but did have a role in The Big Bounce (2004), also based on an Elmore Leonard novel.
7. As of 2014, had appeared in three films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: How the West Was Won (1962), The Godfather: Part II (1974) and The Green Mile (1999). Of those, only The Godfather: Part II (1974) won in the category.
8. In an interview with Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast in 2013, Stanton mentioned that he was offered the lead in an unnamed series as a private investigator for director John Carpenter, but turned it down as he didn't want so much work (it wasn't said when this was that the offer or series took place, and it doesn't seem like the series ever got made).
9. Was in a relationship with Rebecca De Mornay from 1981 to 1983.
10. He starred in two consecutive films written by Sam Shepard: Paris, Texas (1984) and Fool for Love (1985). As it happened, he and Shepard died less than two months apart. Stanton was cremated and his ashes were sprinkled outside downtown Lexington, Kentucky.
11. He has appeared in two films which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival: Paris, Texas (1984) and Wild at Heart (1990).
12. He has appeared in five films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: How the West Was Won (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Godfather: Part II (1974) and Alien (1979).
13. He is buried in Nicholasville, Kentucky's Blue Grass Memorial Gardens and Mausoleum.