Los Angeles - The legendary screen actor and Hollywood rebel Dennis Hopper, best known for directing and starring in his '60s counterculture movie Easy Rider, has died at the age of 74.
He died at his home in Venice, California, a mecca for alternative lifestyles, surrounded by friends, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday, of complications from prostate cancer. At his last public appearance in March,Hopper appeared thin and ill when awarded a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.
In a career spanning five decades, Hopper studied at New York's Actors Studio, where many of America's acting luminaries such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Paul Newman got their start.
He debuted in film in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, where he played one of the high school toughs who menaced the James Dean character.
Hopper rose to world fame with Easy Rider in 1969, a film that reflected the cultural clashes of the Vietnam-War era and the ideals of the emerging counter-cultural revolution. In the film, he directed and also played a motorcycle, drug-dealing long-haired hippie alongside Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Their characters all meet ill fates in the aggressively conservative US South.
Hopper appeared in more than 200 films, including Giant and Blue Velvet, often playing the misfit, outsider or villain. In Apocalypse Now, he played a drug-addicted photographer. He descended into well- publicised drink and drug abuse in the 1970s, before straightening out, becoming a teetotaller and making a comeback with such roles as the villain in Speed.
In addition to his film, television and stage work, Hollywood's enfant terrible made a name in the US and abroad as art collector, painter and photographer extraordinaire. At the opening of an exhibit of his works, he said they represented the only "creative" work of his life.
His portraits from the 1960s were exhibited in Berlin and Bremen. The Austrian Museum of Applied Art exhibited 200 of his paintings, photographs and sculptures as well as film excerpts in a 2001 retrospective.
In 2008, Hopper was named a chevalier of France's Order of Arts and Letters in 2008. His last work focussed on the TV version of the oscar-winning film Crash.
Hoppergrew up on a farm in rural Kansas. In his early 20s, he worked with Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and in the epic Texas film, Giant, about burgeoning Texan oil wealth and its corrupting influence.
After James Dean died in an auto crash before Giant was released, Hopper slipped into his first downward spiral of booze and drugs that put him on many directors' blacklists for being out-of-control and argumentative.
But Hopper then rode Easy Rider to unexpected success: The movie pulled in 50 million dollars, more than ten times the original investment of 400,000 dollars.
Hopper was married five times and had four children, ranging in age from 47 to 6.
