The Death of "Everyman"

Character actor Harry Dean Stanton dies at age 91: LOS ANGELES (AP) —

"Dead ... of Natural Causes".

An odd soliloquy for an actor who portrayed so many "un-natural" men for so many years.

 Never mistaken for a leading man, Stanton was an unforgettable presence to moviegoers, fellow actors and directors, who recognized that his quirky characterizations could lift even the most ordinary script. Roger Ebert once observed that no movie with Stanton in a supporting role "can be altogether bad."

Harry Dean Stanton, a man who refused the usual one- or two-name labels, was one of the most versatile and appealing character actors in Hollywood history.  He never turned in a bad performance.

Correction: he was almost always "bad", but in a 'good' way.

I don't know about you, but I refuse to believe that HDS died of "Natural Causes".

He never played a "natural" role in his life.  Every part he played, every scene he played, he stole from the lead actors.   He was so "natural" in his career, he added verisimilitude to the most bizarre scenes.

He was so eerie, he made you believe the most unlikely scripts; any movie which "co-starred" HDS had a certain something special that you knew you just had to watch it, just to see how he would transform the most mundane character to the one you had to pay attention.

Scenes, entire scripts, were transformed from the mundane to the sublime.  If the director hired Harry, we knew there was something "special" about the movie.  And we were never disappointed.

He was weird, he was bizarre ... his character never was a "minor part" no matter what the script and the casting said.

For those of us who consider ourselves 'average', he elevated the role of the 'average man' to our entire satisfaction.  He developed the role of "every man" beyond the vision of writers, directors, and co-workers.

"I worked with the best directors," Stanton told the AP in a 2013 interview, given while chain-smoking in pajamas and a robe. "Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great."
He said he could have been a director himself but "it was too much work."

That's the image I'll always hold of Harry Dean Stanton.

He was a natural.  The rest of us don't know how that feels, except when we watched him work.