Dennis Hopper dies

Hellraising hollywood actor/director Dennis Hopper died yesterday from prostate cancer. The hollywood legend set sail into the sunset at age 74.

Plagued by legal battles with his wife, he died at home in the Los Angeles beachside district of Venice, surrounded by his “nearest and dearest”, according to friends.

Hopper, known as a hollywood bad boy, helped launch the “counterculture” cinema in 1969 with the hippie road movie Easy Rider, co-starring with Peter Fonda.

Hopper was born in Kansas, the son of a former US intelligence officer who retired to run a post office. The family moved to San Diego in southern California where the unruly teenager struck up an early friendship with the actor Vincent Prince, with whom he shared a passion for modern art. It was that passion for art that would become an obsession.

Friends with brooding actor James Dean, who helped him to secure his first two film jobs in Rebel without a Cause (1955), in which he played one of the high school gang members who menaced Dean’s character, and Giant (1956).

In the late 1960s, Hopper co-wrote and directed Easy Rider. His work on the screenplay earned him the first of two Oscar nominations and a reputation for being a difficult man to work with.

His partying ways and violent outbursts made it difficult to land parts. He later turned to photography and art until recent years becoming an ad spokesman for the retiring yuppie generation.

From buying then undervalued paintings by Mark Rothko in the 1950s and Andy Warhol in the 1960s, Hopper filled his fortress-like home in Venice, then regarded as a gang-ridden danger zone in west Los Angeles, with a rare collection of modern art.

Hopper was married five times, with several former girlfriends and spouses describing him as both brilliant and brutal, prone to domestic violence when drunk.

Earlier this year, despite being in the throes of terminal cancer, he separated from his fifth wife, the actress Victoria Duffy, who was 31 years his junior, after citing her “outrageous behaviour” when he claimed she tried to move artwork valued at more than £1m from their home.

In March a judge ruled that Duffy should stay at least 10 feet away from Hopper, whose weight had fallen to seven stone and who was too ill to attend the hearing.

Nevertheless, Duffy and their daughter Galen, 7, are believed to be the main beneficiaries of most of his $60m fortune.

Some of his roles include:

• Rebel Without a Cause, as Goon, with James Dean in 1955 Giant, again with Dean in 1956, as Jordan Benedict III
• Easy Rider, 1969, when he both starred as Billy, the motorcycle renegade, and directed the cult classic Apocalypse Now, 1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, in which he played a photojournalist
• Blue Velvet, 1986, as the gas-snorting villain Frank Booth
• Hoosiers, 1986, for which he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for playing a basketball-loving drunk