Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton
Stanton on January 28, 2006
Born	(1926-07-14) July 14, 1926 (age 90) West Irvine, Kentucky, United States
Occupation	Actor, musician, singer
Years active	1954–present

Harry Dean Stanton (born July 14, 1926) is an American actor, musician, and singer. Stanton's career has spanned over 60 years, during which he appeared in such films as Cool Hand Luke, Kelly's Heroes, Dillinger, The Godfather Part II, Alien, Escape from New York, Christine, Paris, Texas, Repo Man, Pretty in Pink, The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, The Straight Story, The Green Mile and Inland Empire. Stanton played a recurring role as an LDS polygamist offshoot leader for the first 3 seasons of the HBO television series Big Love.

Stanton was born in Irvine, Kentucky, the son of Sheridan Harry Stanton, a tobacco farmer and barber, and Ersel (née Moberly), a hairdresser. His parents divorced when Stanton was in high school and both later remarried. He has two younger brothers, Archie and Ralph, and a younger half-brother, Stan. The family had a musical background. Stanton attended Lafayette High School and the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he performed at the Guignol Theatre under the direction of UK theater icon Wallace Briggs and studied journalism and radio arts. "I could have been a writer," he told an interviewer for a 2011 documentary, Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland, in which he sings and plays the harmonica. "I had to decide if I wanted to be a singer or an actor. I was always singing. I thought if I could be an actor, I could do all of it." Briggs encouraged him to leave the university and become an actor. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California, where his classmates included his friends Tyler MacDuff and Dana Andrews.