The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on Sunday, at his home in California at the age of 85 years old. In a career spanning seven decades, Stockwell cultivated a rare presence on screen, from his start as a child star during the Golden Age of Hollywood, to the adult with fiery eyes and a wan complexion who captivated audiences through standout performances in the cult pictures Paris, Texas and Blue Velvet and the time-travelling television drama Quantum Leap.
When Dean Stockwell first broke into the business of acting, it was a disposition for watching and listening which won him the part. Born in North Hollywood and spending much of his childhood in New York City, his mother Elizabeth was a vaudeville actress, while his father Harry was an actor and tenor singer who played the cowboy Curly McLain in the Broadway musical Oklahoma! and provided the voice for Prince Charming in the 1937 Walt Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Harry Stockwell was starring in Oklahoma! on Broadway when he heard that a new play was casting for child actors. The playwright and future screenwriter Paul Osborn had adapted the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica under its original title Innocent Voyage.
Sent along by their mother to audition, Dean and his older brother Guy appeared in Innocent Voyage for nine months before the younger Stockwell was invited to a screen test by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The screen test was for the comedian Wally Boag, who took his balloon animals to the Golden Horseshoe Revue at Disneyland and proved an early influence on Steve Martin, but for the art of watching Boag perform, the studio handed Stockwell a movie contract.
His first film was the melodrama The Valley of Decision, with Greer Garson and Gregory Peck receiving top billing and the likes of Lionel Barrymore, Marsha Hunt, Gladys Cooper, and Jessica Tandy rounding out a stellar cast. His second picture placed him alongside Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, and Gene Kelly in the technicolor musical smash Anchors Aweigh.
Now one of the brightest child stars in Hollywood, where he attended the little red schoolhouse on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot alongside Elizabeth Taylor, he played Peck’s son in the anti-prejudice drama Gentleman’s Agreement, quarrelled with Margaret O’Brien in The Secret Garden, and went whaling with Barrymore and Richard Widmark in Down to the Sea in Ships.
But Stockwell preferred comedies to more serious subject matter, recalling that his dreaded first question whenever he found himself cast in another picture was always ‘Is there a crying scene?’ In the comedy-crime caper Song of the Thin Man, he was spanked by William Powell but enjoyed playing alongside him and Myrna Loy. The title role in the anti-war allegory The Boy with Green Hair proved one of his favourites, with Stockwell referencing the character years later in the television film Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. And in Kim, he found a star in Errol Flynn who treated the 13-year-old like an equal, as he discussed sexual conquests and played pranks over a bowl of camel dung.
Stockwell would later lament the spotty education and lack of life experience accrued through his early teens as a contract player for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. At the age of 16 he took a break from acting, enrolled at the Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, and attended the University of California, Berkeley for one year before dropping out and working odd jobs around New Orleans and New York.
When Stockwell returned to acting as a 20 year old in 1956, his fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows made him a natural heir to the the moody young sensitive types played by James Dean and Montgomery Clift. For the best part of a decade, he split steady television work on everything from Wagon Train and Cimarron City to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dr. Kildare with carefully selected roles on film.
In 1957, he took the lead part in the high school melodrama The Careless Years, which marked the directorial debut of Arthur Hiller. Two years later he carried his Broadway performance over to the movie adaptation of Compulsion, where he played alongside Bradford Dillman, Diane Varsi, and Orson Welles. Based on the murder trial of Leopold and Loeb, and much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope teasing out a homosexual attraction between the killers, for the parts of the degenerate youths and their garrulous defence attorney, Stockwell, Dillman, and Welles shared the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1960 he played the part of Paul Morel in an adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel Sons and Lovers. Then in 1962, he was cast alongside titans of the screen and stage, as Sidney Lumet directed an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night. With Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards rounding out the cast, Stockwell portrayed the younger son Edmund who is suffering from tuberculosis with a pallid intellect, prying ears, and a keen sense of anxiety and betrayal as the rot sets in upon the seaside Connecticut home.
From the middle of the sixties, Dean Stockwell pursued a deeper break with Hollywood, and purchased a house in Topanga Canyon where he embraced the hippies and the Beatniks, becoming close friends with artists, poets, musicians, and experimental filmmakers including Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, his fellow former child actor Russ Tamblyn, and the fledgling rock star Neil Young. Stockwell said of his experiences:
‘I did some drugs and went to some love-ins. The experience of those days provided me with a huge, panoramic view of my existence that I didn’t have before. I have no regrets.’
But when Stockwell sought gainful employment as a means to pay the bills, he found that the acting work had all but dried up. In 1968 he took a supporting role in the countercultural classic Psych-Out starring Susan Strasberg and Jack Nicholson, and in 1971 he was part of a large ensemble cast beneath his friend Dennis Hopper as The Last Movie proved a commercial dud. Still for the best part of fourteen years by his own reckoning, he subsisted on the dinner theatre circuit with the odd guest spot on television, and had just obtained a real estate license when he walked onto the set of Dune.
With Neil Young he had co-directed and co-starred in the comedy Human Highway, and the Nicaraguan picture Alsino and the Condor had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, but in the United States both movies saw only a limited release. Stockwell had moved to the town of Taos in New Mexico, and on a work trip over the border opted to try his hand at a meeting with David Lynch.
It was 1982 and Lynch was already established in Mexico as he wrangled with the pre-production of his movie. Having read the book, Stockwell arrived on set and asked the director for a part. Lynch apologised, explaining that the picture had already been cast, but when John Hurt was sidelined owing to scheduling issues, the director remembered the pale-faced former child actor and handed Stockwell the part of Wellington Yueh. Of their first meeting, Lynch would later inform Stockwell:
‘If I looked a little strange when you walked into the commissary, it was because I thought you were dead.’
Shooting for Dune had wrapped and the film was labouring through post-production when another stroke of fortune gave Stockwell an added boost. Dennis Hopper invited him to the Sante Fe Film Festival, where a meeting with their old acquaintance Harry Dean Stanton resulted in Stockwell being cast as Stanton’s brother in the upcoming movie Paris, Texas. Directed by Wim Wenders from a screenplay by L. M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, the fugue-like road movie wandered out of the desert to pick up the FIPRESCI Prize and the Palme d’Or. Crediting Paris, Texas for providing him with a clean slate, Stockwell said:
‘After Paris, Texas and Dune I think I’ve got a pretty good start on what amounts to a third career.’
Necessity as a child actor had taught Dean Stockwell to rely on his intuition. Eschewing easy sentimentality and the rigours of method acting, he adopted the stance of an outsider and lingered on the margins of his films. In Paris, Texas as Walt Henderson, he grounded the picture against the waifish naiveté and wilful forgetting of Stanton as Travis, with every gesture imbued with an anxiety borne of past griefs. Keenly attentive, hard-nosed or rapt with a wilting sort of passion, his probing eyes and considered gestures told equally of a capacity to hurt or be hurt.
The tougher side of his character was on ravishing display in Blue Velvet in the role of Ben. Back together with David Lynch, this time in an independent feature, Stockwell was given free reign to devise the costume and makeup for his character, with his ruffled white shirt, gold-printed jacket, and white trousers standing in stark contrast to the leather-clad Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth. With his left hand holding a long cigarette holder while draped in layers of bandage, Ben mimes the lyrics to the song ‘In Dreams’ by Roy Orbison in one of cinema’s truly unforgettable scenes.
Stockwell said that he based the fluttering eyes and tilted posture of Ben on the comedy stylings of Carol Burnett, who played a snooty woman to winning effect on her long-running variety show, with Stockwell adding that Burnett ‘laughed her head off when I told her’. He imagined that Ben was probably on heroin, and comparing him to the antagonist Frank Booth, described the character as ‘black-on-black’.
Booth is utterly captivated by Ben even as he froths and spits tacks, with Ben showing more than a trace of a sneer as Booth turns off the radio, bringing an impromptu end to the performance. Ben crosses his arms and leans away. Even when your friends include a gas-huffing, drug dealing, psychotic pimp with dual personalities, familiarity can breed cool indifference and the clean outlines of contempt.
Blue Velvet restored David Lynch to critical acclaim and confirmed his reputation as one of America’s foremost surrealists following the fiasco of Dune. For Dennis Hopper like Stockwell, the film marked a career resurgence. It made stars of its young couple Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern. And for Isabella Rossellini, who won an Independent Spirit Award for her part as the nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, the picture cultivated a new career and a new persona as an actress. Stockwell said:
‘Blue Velvet helped everybody – except commercial filmmakers. It helped independent filmmakers. It helped adventurous filmmakers. It helped guys willing to go out on a limb, because here was someone going out on the farthest limb you can imagine and making it. It helped Dennis, it helped me, it helped Isabella Rossellini. It certainly helped David Lynch.’
Now Stockwell was once more a familiar face on television, appearing in episodes of The A-Team and Murder, She Wrote while starring in one of the most memorable episodes of Miami Vice as a former CIA agent in the second season episode ‘Bushido’. On the big screen he was on a tear, with parts in To Live and Die in L.A., Beverly Hills Cop II, and Gardens of Stone and Tucker: The Man and His Dream by Francis Ford Coppola. Then in 1988 he played against type in Married to the Mob as Tony ‘The Tiger’ Russo. For the part of the charmingly sinister crime boss, Stockwell received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1989, his career took a sharp turn as he signed on to play the second lead in the science fiction series Quantum Leap. With the film roles coming thick and fast, his decision surprised even the series creator Donald P. Bellisario, but Stockwell had a wife and two young children back home in Taos, and appreciated the steady work, fixed locale, and stable shooting schedule.
A cigar-smoking Navy rear admiral with a penchant for alcohol and romantic dalliances, Al Calavicci appears in the series as a hologram, guiding the quantum physicist Dr. Sam Beckett as he hops through the twentieth century, attempting to correct the mistakes of the past. The character of Al deepened over the course of the series between revelations of his childhood in an orphanage and the remarriage of his beloved first wife, and Stockwell forged a close working relationship with the series lead Scott Bakula, saying of his time on the show:
‘I have a particular fondness for Admiral Al Calavicci. I guess people say that actors take a little bit of the part away with them, but if I really was as streetwise and cocky as Al, I’d probably have been a bigger star.’
He continued to score cameos and character roles on film, appearing as a desperate screenwriter in The Player by Robert Altman and in the Hollywood blockbuster Air Force One, before reuniting with Coppola towards the end of the decade in The Rainmaker. On television he joined the cast of the short-lived sitcom The Tony Danza Show, played the recurring part of a senator in JAG, and from 2006 found a new home as the main antagonist on Battlestar Galactica.
Dean Stockwell was a collage artist and a passionate environmentalist, who from the eighties advocated for greater awareness around the effects of ozone depletion and climate change. In the artistic hub of Taos, which once supported a colony around the wealthy patron Mable Dodge Luhan and remained a centre for modernist and abstract painters, Stockwell began to exhibit his own collages and sculptures, which became part of the collections of Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, and Ed Ruscha. Hopper remained a close friend and neighbour in Ranchos de Taos until his own death at the age of 74 in 2010.
The classic Neil Young album After the Gold Rush was inspired by a screenplay written by Stockwell and the lyricist Herb Bermann, with Stockwell describing the concept as a ‘Jungian self-discovery of the gnosis’. He also took the photograph of Wallace Berman which appeared on the cover of The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. At the height of his ‘third career’, in 1990 Stockwell won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for his part in Quantum Leap, and in 1992 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A stroke suffered in 2015 resulted in Stockwell’s retirement from acting. One of his last parts saw him reunite with Scott Bakula in an episode of NCIS: New Orleans entitled ‘Chasing Ghosts’. His death on Sunday brought tributes from friends and collaborators including David Lynch, Russ Tamblyn, and Bakula, who fondly remembered his ‘dear friend and mentor’, adding:
‘Having been a famous child actor, he had a soft spot for every young actor who came on our set. He was very protective of their rights and safety and always checked in with them to make sure that they were OK. His big hearted response to the kids made all of us take notice and be better guardians ourselves.’
