Actor Dennis Hopper dies at 74

Dennis Hopper, the menacing, laser-eyed actor and filmmaker who forced Hollywood to acknowledge the hippie generation with his 1969 film "Easy Rider," yet eventually became a clean-and-sober Reagan-era Republican, family man and supporting player in movies such as "Blue Velvet" and "Speed," died Saturday. He was 74.

The actor died at his home in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, The Associated Press reported. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Though still remembered as the Harley-riding hippie in "Easy Rider," Hopper was not so easily defined. In a 2005 Newsday interview, the onetime counterculture icon said he had voted Republican since Ronald Reagan's presidency. Hopper vocally supported President George W. Bush and the Iraq war but in 2009 announced that he would vote for Barack Obama, calling Sarah Palin "a cartoon."

Born May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., but raised in San Diego, Hopper trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg and split his time between acting, painting and photography. During the 1960s in New York he photographed artists, rock stars and fashion designers. He also created an unusual text-and-photo collage for the cover of Ike and Tina Turner's 1966 album "River Deep - Mountain High."

And although a teenage Hopper appeared in two James Dean blockbusters, "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) and "Giant" (1956), he seemed to arrive out of nowhere with "Easy Rider," serving as the director, star and co-writer (with co-star Peter Fonda and the satirist Terry Southern).

The story of two hippies on a motorcycle trip through a hostile America, "Easy Rider" introduced mainstream audiences to on-screen drug use, hippie philosophy and avant-garde directorial flourishes. It also provided a big break to an actor named Jack Nicholson, as a squaresville lawyer who chucks his life to join the journey.

The movie's surprise success convinced an ossified Hollywood to open its doors to new talent and new approaches. The following years would see the Oscar-winning documentary "Woodstock" (1970); the disaffected character study "Five Easy Pieces" (1971), also starring Nicholson; and Robert Altman's vicious filleting of American values, "Nashville" (1975).

Still, Hopper's acting career faltered until he appeared in David Lynch's nightmarish film noir "Blue Velvet" (1986). As Frank Booth - a homicidal pervert who chugs Pabst Blue Ribbon, wears a gas mask during sex and grows violent at the sound of Roy Orbison's voice - Hopper created one of the most memorable and terrifying roles in cinema.

Although his resume would go on to include a range of roles - an Oscar-nominated turn as the town drunk in "Hoosiers" (1986), a spineless Democrat in "Swing Vote" - Hopper clearly excelled at playing tightly coiled, half-sane men filled with murderous impulses.

In terms of mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, his biggest was the 1994 action flick "Speed," with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, in which Hopper gleefully played a deranged bomber who rigs a bus filled with passengers to explode.

Hopper filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, in January of this year. He is survived by three daughters - Marin, Ruthana and Galen Grier - and a son, Henry.

In recent years, Hopper pooh-poohed the dominant liberalism of Hollywood culture, which he noted had not stopped him from making dozens of film and television appearances.

"A lot of people treat me differently, and they do bring it up," Hopper told Newsday in 2005. "I'll be at a dinner party, and somebody will say, 'Well, you couldn't be thinking that . .' And then you realize that everybody at the table is looking at you, and they're like, 'You're kidding! You're not really for Bush.' And it goes around the table."

He added, "It can only stop me from eating, not working."