Harry Dean Stanton at a movie premiere in Hollywood in April 2012. Photo: ReutersHarry Dean Stanton, whose scruffy looks and off-beat demeanour made him a favourite of directors seeking a character actor to add eccentricity or melancholy to the screen, has died from natural causes, his agent said. "He's one of those actors who knows that his face is the story," his friend Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor, said in the 2012 documentary "Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction." "After Jack said that, my whole approach to acting opened up," Stanton told Entertainment Weekly. Stanton made a second career of music, playing regularly in Los Angeles and sometimes touring with the Harry Dean Stanton Band, in which he sang and played guitar and harmonica.

Source: Otago Daily Times September 15, 2017 23:26 UTC