Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton, Kentucky-born character actor whose lined face and underplayed voice became a second language of American film from Cool Hand Luke and The Godfather Part II to Alien, Paris, Texas, and Lucky, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on September 15, 2017. He was ninety-one. Navy service in World War II preceded decades in which directors hired him when they needed a man who looked like he had already survived the plot. Born July 14, 1926, in West Irvine, Kentucky, Stanton worked stages and then screens without chasing conventional leading-man polish. Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas gave him a near-silent center; Ridley Scott’s Alien put him in a crew that felt like coworkers instead of archetypes; late roles including Lucky let him play mortality without asking the audience for pity. Between takes he sang and played guitar in clubs, a musician’s habit that never needed a separate brand. Ninety-one years is a long ledger of supporting parts that somehow became the reason people rewatched. Los Angeles hospitals closed a Kentucky story that Hollywood had borrowed for half a century. Friends remembered a man who could fill a frame by almost disappearing into it. He died in Los Angeles on September 15, 2017. The filmography is the monument. Stanton’s craft was negative space — what he declined to overact — and it made other people’s dialogue land harder. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 15 remembers a Navy veteran and character actor who made weariness look like wisdom without advertising it.