Dennis Hopper in 2007. Photograph: David Levene
"Sometimes he goes too far. He's the first one to admit it." That's Dennis Hopper's ranting photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now (1979), talking about Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the homicidal megalomaniac to whom he is in thrall. In his half-century acting career, Hopper himself acquired a reputation for going over the top, both on screen and off – a notoriety with plenty of justification but one, he once told me, that limited his performing options and overshadowed his moving ability to play straight when the role demanded. "I don't have a problem playing bad guys," he said, "but it would be more interesting if I had a variety of roles to play."
After studying with the Actors Studio and appearing on television, Hopper got roles in two of James Dean's three features. In this clip from Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the 20-year-old Hopper is recognisable as the gang member leaning on top of Jimmy's car wearing a familiar-looking red jacket, though he has little to do in the movie.
The story is that Nicholas Ray slashed Hopper's part after discovering that, like Ray, he was sleeping with Natalie Wood.
He had more to do in Giant (1956), as Jordy, the son of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor's Bick and Leslie Benedict. Not that he needed dialogue: in this music-dominated scene, the naively excited Jordy shocks his parents by turning up a party with the Mexican-American wife they didn't know he had.
Over the next decade or so, Hopper worked solidly on crime, cowboy and drama shows on TV, including The Twilight Zone, and took supporting roles in movies, including Cool Hand Luke (1967) and the westerns Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Hang 'Em High (1968) and True Grit (1969). He took up art collecting and photography in the 1950s, providing landscape shots for the cover of Ike and Tina Turner's River Deep – Mountain High in 1966.
There was perhaps more in his art and photography careers than in his early acting work to anticipate Easy Rider (1969), the counterculture classic he created with notorious passion and which will certainly stand as his most singular film-making achievement. It's worth noting that he seems less manically driven on camera than we know he was behind it – his Billy is in many ways the film's straight man. This clip, set to Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild, shows the loving attention Hopper paid to the American landscape, as well as the formal experimentation and combination of fatalism and joie de vivre that made the film so compelling.
Following the failure of his even more radical followup as director, The Last Movie (1971), Hopper established the line in charismatic loons that would increasingly define him as a performer. There was significant ambiguity in such roles as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, in Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977), and that photojournalist in Apocalypse Now (1979).
Initially welcoming to the squad led by Martin Sheen's Willard – "I'm an American!" – he turns out to be an evangelical apologist for slaughter, barking animatedly at Willard trapped in a cage. Audiences would increasingly know how Willard felt.
Hopper's industry-friendly direction of Out of the Blue (1980) brought a degree of Hollywood rehabilitation, followed up with memorable appearances in Rumble Fish and The Osterman Weekend (both 1983) and River's Edge. Only with David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) did he deliver a performance to eclipse Apocalypse Now.
It's hard to say what's more terrifying – his mesmerically psychopathic, eye-popping, gas-huffing, gut-punching, mommy-pleading performance as Frank Booth or his insistence to Lynch that "I am Frank Booth". Whether telling Isabella Rossellini "Baby wants to fuck" or reminding Kyle MacLachlan that if "you receive a love letter form me, you're fucked forever", this portrait of sexual and violent mania would remain Hopper's outstanding achievement as an actor.
He went on to direct Colors (1988), and then directed and appeared in Catchfire (1990), from which he dissociated himself. There were also strong turns in Paris Trout (1991), Red Rock West (1993) and True Romance (1993), in which he played the sympathetic straight guy during a bravura face-off with Christopher Walken.
More common were rabid villain roles in the likes of Super Mario Bros (1993), Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995).
In 2000, when I spoke to Hopper by phone at his California home about his role as the bad guy in a TV version of Jason and the Argonauts, he was philosophical about typecasting, animated about art and preoccupied with keeping his German shepherd, Otto, from stealing his lunch. "I've been in a lot of really bad movies that I think I gave some of my best performances in," he maintained. "And there were some movies that I've really been bad in … It's shaky material a lot of the time but I try to do the best job that I can under the circumstances."
He continued to take villainous roles, including Victor Drazen in the first season of 24 (2002) and as a smug plutocrat ("Zombies, man. They creep me out") in George A Romero's Land of the Dead (2005).
His most recent performances included a continuing character in the TV adaptation of Crash (2008-9) and as the voice of reason in Elegy (2008), in which he played George, the best friend of Ben Kingsley's priapic professor David Kepesh ("You gotta stop worrying about growing old and worry about growing up"). The character's death left Kepesh blindsided and bewildered.
Of his onscreen work, Hopper will undoubtedly be best remembered for his most antic turns – the extraordinary energy and menace he brought to Apocalypse Now and, especially, Blue Velvet remain standout elements of cinematic masterworks. But it would be a shame if those accomplishments shouted out his quieter performances, not to mention his work as a director and visual artist. "People," as he insisted to me, "can do a lot of different crafts and a lot of different arts and still be one person."
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