Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopperwas an American actor, filmmaker, photographer, and artist. He attended the Actors Studio, made his first television appearance in 1954, and soon after appeared alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Causeand Giant. In the next ten years he made a name in television, and by the end of the 1960s had appeared in several films. Hopper also began a prolific and acclaimed photography career in the 1960s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth17 May 1936
CityDodge City, KS
CountryUnited States of America
Banks wont even loan each other money, everybody's going broke, and here we are inside here, these people are going to be out on the street selling apples and pencils and they're still going to be buying paintings for this money, so I don't know what's going on in this world.
The reality of things going on around me is more interesting than the fantasies of the world I work in.
When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!
I was an abstract expressionist before I had seen any abstract expressionist paintings. I started when I was a kid and continued just doing abstract stuff all through high school.
I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.
I never really made any money and it certainly cost me more to take photographs than I got for them.
I was someone who was out of control and not to be worked with. It was partly because method acting was a new thing in Hollywood then and Marlon Brando had gotten through and Montgomery Clift had gotten through and James Dean but beyond that there wasn't really anybody.
I'm still around artists. I don't have anymore wall space. And I don't have the money to collect anymore, the prices are outrageous.
I've always been doing some sort of art. I started off, when I was very young, painting.
I couldn't get a job acting all the time and there were down periods where I could take photographs or paint. I got into a lot of trouble when I was young, from making two films with James Dean, watching him work and then him dying and thinking I could turn down work. There was a big difference, he was a star and I wasn't. So I got in a lot of trouble and was essentially banned from Hollywood.
I went back to photography in the 1990s. But from the 60s to the 90s I didn't really take any photographs at all, unfortunately. During that period I lived in France, I lived in England, I lived all over the place in different cities. I didn't take any photographs and because I felt I had really accomplished everything that I wanted to in photography during the period between 61 and 67.
Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.
As an actor, you have no control really.
I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.