Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel

This garden-variety biography of actor Harry Dean Stanton (1926–2017) from Atkins (Covering for the Bosses), a University of Missouri journalism professor, struggles to match its subject’s colorful persona. Atkins serviceably traces Stanton’s career trajectory: raised in rural Estill Country, Ky., he served in the WWII-era Navy and later studied acting at the University of Kentucky. After struggling as an actor in New York City, he decamped to California’s famous Pasadena Playhouse, which proved his entrée to a Hollywood career both the perfect onscreen outsider and “a tiny island of near normalcy in an ocean of weirdness.” One essential point Atkins conveys is the importance of timing in Stanton’s career: not only was the actor’s distinctive hangdog visage a familiar sight in the innovative studio productions, including Cool Hand Luke and The Godfather, Part II, that pushed Hollywood into more adventurous territory in the late 1960s and ’70s, but, with starring turns in independently-made ’80s films like Repo Man and Paris, Texas, he also anticipated the ’90s indie boom. Unfortunately, Stanton tends to get buried amid all his credits, and Atkins struggles to get inside his subject’s introspective, laconic personality. But, for the actor’s fans, even a by-the-numbers account of his life and career will be better than no Stanton bio at all. [em](Nov.) [/em]