Profile: Dennis Hopper

IN THE end it proved to be just another scurrilous rumour. Hollywood hellraiser Dennis Hopper was supposed to have put his troubled past behind him and to be enjoying a sedate old age with his fifth wife and daughter.

Instead, as he launches a dramatic death-bed bid to divorce Victoria Duffy (and claim custody of six-year-old Galen), it is clear the troubled actor is fated to end his life the way he lived it: at the centre of a scandal. But this time Hopper is so ill, his erratic conduct seems pathetic as opposed to attractively dangerous.

When news broke that the 73-year-old, who has prostate cancer, was divorcing Victoria, his wife of 13 years, it seemed the notorious misogynist was reverting to type: at least three of his other marriages fell apart amidst allegations of his bad behaviour. In a declaration filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Victoria says Hopper threatened to kill her, kept loaded guns around the house, took marijuana and exposed his daughter to inappropriate sexual material. And there's more. According to his wife, the divorce case is being driven not by Hopper himself but by Marin – the daughter of his marriage to socialite Brooke Hayward, who is dragging her heavily medicated father out to lawyers' offices – in order to carve out a larger share of his legacy for herself.

Sad though this is, it is a strangely apt denouement for a man whose immense creativity (he has won acclaim as a photographer, painter and art collector, as well as an actor) has always been overshadowed by his insatiable appetite for sex, drugs and alcohol. That Hopper – who once tried to jump out of a moving plane – could ever have passed away quietly at home is unthinkable to those who have followed his combustible career: from his early performances in Rebel Without A Cause and Giant to his later ones on the US TV series Crash, he has been nothing if not provocative.

Whether he was refusing to take directions from director Henry Hathaway or admitting to having hit several of his wives, he seemed to court controversy, revelling in people's revulsion. This, after all, is the man who never tired of telling interviewers how, after he read the script of Blue Velvet, he rang David Lynch to plead for the role of the gas-inhaling, sexually deviant villain Frank Booth, telling him: "I am Frank Booth."

He is naturally pugilistic, making enemies everywhere he goes. More than 40 years on, he is still bitter over his bust-up with his former friend and Easy Rider co-star Peter Fonda, whom he sued over the writing credits and profits. Yet he also has a capacity for friendship and a keen eye for art. Working as a photographer in New York in the early Sixties, he found himself at the centre of the in-crowd, and was one of the first to cotton on to the potential of pop art, picking up one of Andy Warhol's first soup can pictures for $75.

Hopper's drug consumption – in the late Seventies he was said to be taking three grammes of cocaine a day, along with marijuana and prodigious amounts of alcohol – may lead some to assume he is the product of a broken home. But despite his tales of sniffing gasoline from his grandfather's tractor, his was a relatively secure childhood. He may have spent his early years on an alfalfa farm in Kansas, but his father was a former member of the OSS – the precursor to the CIA – before becoming a post office manager. Later, in Kansas City, Missouri, he attended art classes and, after the family had moved to San Diego, he was voted pupil most likely to succeed by his high school class.

Although Hopper was always attracted to acting, what he really wanted was to be recognised as a genius, so he set out to emulate the excessive lifestyle of a tortured artist. Devastated by the death of James Dean, he took on the mantle of Hollywood bad boy.

He threw himself into photography. Carrying a camera everywhere – on film sets and locations, diners and bars – he took a series of seminal images which have been exhibited throughout the world. By 1969, however, he was back in Hollywood. Teaming up with Fonda, writer Terry Southern and Jack Nicholson, he directed what was to become his defining work: the landmark counterculture film Easy Rider. A story of the pursuit of freedom against a background of paranoia and corruption, it was made in a drug-induced haze. Relations between the stars fractured, culminating in the scene in the New Orleans cemetery where Hopper demanded Fonda exploit his feelings towards his own mother – who committed suicide when he was ten – and sob "You're such a fool mother, I hate you so much," to a statue of the Madonna.

Despite the rows, Easy Rider was a triumph. It won Hopper an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay and propelled him into Hollywood's premier league. But his brush with the big time was fleeting. By the time The Last Movie opened, the maverick had burned many of his bridges and his drug consumption was off the scale. He sustained his career throughout the Seventies by playing tormented maniacs in a string of films, including Apocalypse Now, and managed to achieve moments of brilliance despite his mounting addiction.

His relationships were often bizarre. His marriage to Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips lasted all of eight days before she baled out, accusing him of making excessive sexual demands.

Hopper loves to tell how while shooting a film in Mexico, he disappeared into the jungle, to be found wandering naked by police days later. In fact the episode signalled a breakdown which resulted in him going to rehab and being fed anti-psychotic drugs which gave him the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. When he emerged quasi-dry in the mid-Eighties, his acting career had a resurgence, with roles in Rumble Fish and Hoosiers. He directed the critically acclaimed Colors and his portrayal of Booth brought him a cult following. But Hollywood never really took him to its heart and he has spent much of the latter part of his life playing quirky parts in low-budget films and TV series such as 24.

Once a left-winger who took part in civil rights marches, he also lost his counterculture status as he moved towards the right, supporting Ronald Reagan and both Bushes (although he did back Barack Obama).

In recent interviews, Hopper has acknowledged he failed to reach the dizzy heights he had hoped for. "There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know. But I think they are moments," he has said. "I never felt I played the great part. I never felt that I directed the great movie. And I can't say that it's anybody's fault but my own." With such flashes of self-awareness, it seemed Hopper might finally be achieving a degree of serenity. But now, as Victoria sharpens the knives and his world disintegrates into chaos, it is clear the demons that have stalked his life are destined to pursue him to the grave.

Actor Rip Torn won a defamation case against Dennis Hopper after the actor told The Tonight Show With Jay Leno that Torn, originally cast in Easy Rider, had been replaced by Jack Nicholson after pulling a knife on Hopper. Torn said it was Hopper who had pulled a knife on him.

• In 1983, Hopper – by then drug-addled and delusional – staged a potentially suicidal "art happening" at Rice University Media Centre in Texas, in which he crouched under a chair and tried to blow himself up with 17 sticks of dynamite.

• "Dennis is a genius. I'm not sure of what, and I'm not sure Dennis knows of what. Certainly not acting. But he is a genius." – Joanne Woodward on Hopper's creative talents.

• "The first seven days were great." – Hopper on his eight-day marriage to Michelle Phillips, above.