Commentary: The famous character actor died Friday at age 91, and he is already dearly missed.
Harry Dean Stanton plays a doomed engineer in the sci-fi horror “Alien.”
There are not a lot of actors whose performances can make me cry and laugh in the same film. But Harry Dean Stanton is one of them. And sadly, the beloved actor has left us forever, dying from natural causes at the age of 91 on Friday.
Stanton played countless characters since his 1954 debut in the TV show ” Inner Sanctum,” but I first came across Stanton when he played the doomed engineering technician Brett, in the sci-fi horror film ” Alien ” (1979). His character was both hilarious and heartbreaking.
I loved seeing Stanton play the impatient, grumpy boss Bud in ” Repo Man ” (1984). While everyone else was watching the movie’s main star Emilio Estevez, my eyes were glued on Stanton, who stole every scene he was in.
Harry Dean Stanton plays the kind of boss most of us would steer clear from in “Repo Man.”
Stanton had a special way of making his characters the most memorable people in everything he was in. In ” The Green Mile ” (1999), he played the talkative inmate Toot-Toot who could make even the most stoic prison guards laugh.
In the sci-fi film ” Escape from New York ” (1981), when Stanton played Snake’s double-crossing buddy Harold “Brain” Hellman, you still couldn’t help but root for him a little.
