Hopper is dead - now war looms over his estate

A bitter war over Dennis Hopper's estate is looming after the actor's death at 74. He had been battling prostrate cancer for months, trying to live long enough to get divorced from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, so that he could disinherit her. But the divorce had not been finalised by the time he died on Saturday.

As a result, Duffy stands to inherit a quarter of his estimated $60m fortune, much of it made up of modern art works by Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Hopper's will stipulated that Duffy would receive 25 per cent of his estate plus a $250,000 life insurance payout as long as the couple were still living together and still married when he died. Lawyers for his three adult children, led by his eldest daughter, Marin Hopper, are expected to argue that they were not living together  - they had separate houses on his estate at Venice, California - and that they were only married at the time of death because the divorce, which Hopper had sought in January, had not come through.

As Californian lawyers tuck in, the obituary writers and film critics have been mourning a man who made a huge impact on Hollywood.

He played the freaky cocaine-dealing biker, Billy, in Easy Rider; the photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; the psycho, Frank, in David Lynch's best film Blue Velvet; and the deranged Howard Payne in Speed. But no role ever overshadowed that of the real-life character Dennis Hopper.
 
His cult classic, Easy Rider, which Hopper directed himself, starring with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to deal with drugs, and its timing was impeccable. Made for less than half a million dollars, it took $21m at the box office when it opened in the summer of 1969.

Years later, Hopper told Entertainment Weekly: "We'd gone through the whole '60s and nobody had made a film about anybody smoking grass without going out and killing a bunch of nurses. I wanted Easy Rider to be a time capsule for people about that period."

Easy Rider coincided with a drug-addled, drinking binge that sent him careening headlong into a period of near-madness, making his angle on the Sixties drug culture entirely authentic. This was the 'counter culture' but it was a dramatic departure from the style of Andy Warhol, whose films of the period were voyeuristic and monotonous. Hopper blasted the viewer with full-on images of a life consumed by sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll - while he was living it.

"I was doing half a gallon rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine a day - and that wasn't to get high, that was just to keep going, man," he once said.

To think he kept going to 74. For once, the obituaries express amazement rather than shock.
 
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:David Hinckley, the New York Daily News: "For more than 50 years, Dennis Hopper brought an extra edge to every role because some little unspoken something told us that maybe he really was as nuts as the guy he was playing."

Robert Mendick, the Daily Telegraph: "With a gravelly voice and a menacing appearance, he was one of the most distinctive actors of his era. He was also a supremely gifted director."

Manohla Dargis, the New York Times: "[Easy Rider] became a model for a new American cinema, one that was young and emancipated from the old studio mind-think, a declaration of creative independence that lasted (in theory) until Steven Spielberg's great white shark ate its way through the box office six summers later, initiating the Blockbuster Age."

Peter Fonda, quoted in the Northern Echo: "We rode the highways of America and changed the way movies were made in Hollywood. I was blessed by his passion and friendship."

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian: "His Billy is nervy, whiny, tense and utterly dependent on Peter Fonda's supercool alpha male for direction. He is recognisably the same character as the whacko photographer who was to go upriver with Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz 10 years later in Apocalypse Now." ·