Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton is an American actor, musician, and singer. Stantons career has spanned over sixty years, during which he appeared in such films as Cool Hand Luke Kellys 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. In the late 2000s, he played a regular role in 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 , 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 halfbrother, 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 fr

Source: Wikipedia