(5 March 1936 - 7 November 2021)
The American actor Dean Stockwell was born into a theatrical family. His father Harry was an actor and his mother Betty a chorus girl. His older brother, Guy Stockwell (1933-2002), was also an actor. Dean was on stage from the age of seven in a Theater Guild production, along with his brother. Discovered as a child star in 1945 he appeared in the MGM films The Valley of Decision with Greer Garson and Gregory Peck, Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, The Green Years with Charles Coburn and The Mighty McGurk with Wallace Beery. He continued working at Metro until the Fox studio used him for Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck, Deep Waters and Down to the Sea in Ships with Richard Widmark. He did not enjoy working with Peck, but did get on with Widmark and Sinatra and also with Errol Flynn on Kim (1950) in an adaptation from Rudyard Kipling. By the time he was fifteen Dean Stockwell had made some twenty films. Perhaps his most interesting roles up to that time were in Joseph Losey's The Boy Who Turned Green (1948), a parable about accepting people for who they are, and The Secret Garden (1949) n which he was a crippled child kept away from life in the story based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel.
On leaving high school, Stockwell gave films a miss for five years, returning in 1956 for some television work and a few feature films. In 1959 he made Richard Fleischer's Compulsion, based on the Leopold-Loeb murder case, and he was surprisingly good as Paul Morel in Jack Cardiff's Sons and Lovers, from the D.H. Lawrence novel. Then he continued in television before Sidney Lumet's filming of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) in which he played Edmund opposite Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson. After Rapture, Psych-Out and The Dunwich Horror, Stockwell was in Dennis Hopper's controversial The Last Movie (1971). After that it was a mixture of odd films and TV until Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and the original Dune (1984) directed by David Lynch who also cast him in Blue Velvet in which he famously sang Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams'. He will be remembered for these films and also for William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., Beverly Hills Cop II and Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob (Academy Award nomination for Stockwell) and his remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and also as Howard Hughes in Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: the Man and His Dreams. On TV it will be JAG, Battlestar Galactica and nearly a hundred episodes of Quantum Leap (1989-1993) playing Admiral Al Calavicci. Dean Stockwell, who has died of natural causes at the age of 85, was married to the actress Millie Perkins and then to Joy Marchenko, with whom he has two children, Austin and Sophie. Both marriages ended in divorce.
MICHAEL DARVELL
