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This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Terry Gross.
We're going to continue our series classic films and movie icons with interviews from our archive with Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, two stars of the groundbreaking 1986 film Blue Velvet.
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That's Dennis Hopper in the film Blue Velvet, which was directed by David lynch, who described Hopper as sort of the perfect american dangerous hero.
Blue Velvet was one of Hopper's comeback films.
A few years before that, he'd been institutionalized, paranoid and totally disoriented from years of drugs and alcohol.
Early in his career, he was in two defining films about youth, rebel without a cause, in which he had a small part, an easy rider, which he directed and starred in with Peter Fonda.
While Hopper was still using drugs, he played a drug addled photojournalist in Apocalypse Now.
Dennis Hopper died in 2010 of prostate cancer at the age of 74.
We're going to hear excerpts of two interviews with him, starting with the one we recorded in 1990.
We began by talking about his role in Blue Velvet as Frank Booth, a crazy, dangerous and weird character.
Hopper said that when he read the script, he told director David Lynch, I am Frank.
I really understood Frankenhein.
I didn't have a problem with Frank.
I understood.