Dean Stockwell

He was such a cute kid... big dimples, eyes that lit up, a great shock of thick, brown curls and an endearing smile.  He was also a fine actor, recognized as such before he was in a double-digit age.  He was very intelligent and spoke with such a confident air, rather adult-like and his scenes with popular adult actors sparkled.  To this day when I see one of his kid films coming on television, I am quick to watch it.

He once said I didn't enjoy acting particularly when I was young.  I thought it was a lot of work.  There were a few films that I enjoyed, they were comedies, they were not important films, weren't very successful.  I was always pretty much known as a serious kid.  He certainly was a serious kid but audiences would never have known he didn't enjoy acting back then.  What a natural he was.  

He was in a goodly number of movies as a young kid.  In the late 50's and early 60's he made three damned good ones, displaying that he still had what it took, and he was still working as of four years ago.  Of all the child stars from Hollywood's Golden Age, he was one of the very best.  He's also one of the very few still alive from that time.

Born in 1936 in North Hollywood, California, he hailed from a family of actors and entertainers.  His older brother, Guy, had a movie career himself although he was never as successful as Dean.
Raised in New York City, his parents were keen to get both boys into acting.  One day the mother took her sons to try out for a Broadway play and both were hired.  Dean was seven years old.  That experience led him to the gates of MGM where he was signed to a contract.

His first decent role at the studio was as Kathryn Grayson's nephew in the mega-popular Anchors Aweigh (1945), also starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.  20th Century Fox borrowed him for Home Sweet Homicide (1946) where he's one of a mystery writer's  three children who stumble upon a neighborhood murder.  It is such a delightful film.   

The following year he played Gregory Peck's son in the Oscar-winning Gentleman's Agreement.  He found the film about anti-Semitism too serious and he didn't like doing it. 

When his mother informed him of the next movie he was going to do, he always asked whether he had a crying scene or had to have a temper tantrum.

He played a runaway orphan who wanted to go to sea in the moody Dark Waters (1948) opposite Jean Peters and Dana Andrews and then he accomplished that goal the following year in Down to the Sea in Ships as cantankerous Lionel Barrymore's grandson and Richard Widmark's protégé.  It was one of his biggest roles so far and he acquitted himself quite nicely.  Widmark became one of Dean's favorite costars.

Much was made about his title role in The Boy with the Green Hair (1948) about a boy who is subjected to much ridicule after he awakens one day with... you know.  He must have been swept away by the hoopla because he thought it was an important film but it turned out to be a major flop.

The Happy Years (1950)... not to be confused with his The Green Years (1946) or The Careless Years (1957)... is by far my favorite young Stockwell role.  He is top-billed as an incorrigible student at  Lawrenceville Preparatory School in 1896 whose life is full of fights and problems with other students until a teacher turns his life around.  It is also a good role for another child star, Darryl Hickman.  Loved the smart writing of this delightful boyhood saga and I'll never understand why it wasn't more successful.

He quit movie acting for a few years, although there was some television work, while he graduated from high school and briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley before dropping out.  He said he was unhappy and couldn't get along with people. 

In 1957 he returned to Broadway to play the role of Judd Steiner in Compulsion, based on the Leopold & Loeb thrill-killing story.  In 1959, now 23 years old, he appeared in the film version opposite Bradford Dillman, Diane Varsi and Orson Welles.  He and Dillman (they did not get along) were sensational as the killers.

In 1960 he made Sons and Lovers, based on the D.H. Lawrence coal-mining story of a young mama's boy who has an unhealthy relationship with both of his parents, played by Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller.  While the setting is dull and oppressive, the writing is top-notch and the acting most compelling.  Stockwell said they all had a wonderful time making the film.

High drama with Wendy Hiller & Trevor Howard

In 1960 he married Millie Perkins who created a brief sensation in the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).  They appeared everywhere in the press as the hip new couple but the marriage soured after only two years.

After returning to television, he made arguably the best filmed play ever made, Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), based on the Eugene O'Neill work of a deeply-troubled family.  Directed by the great Sidney Lumet, the ensemble acting of Stockwell, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards and Ralph Richardson is mesmerizing.  Stockwell said that he incurred Hepburn's wrath when he brought vodka onto the set.

After three bravura performances in highly-esteemed movies, one wonders why Stockwell didn't parlay it into a bigtime movie career.  He had embraced the hippie movement and there were the drugs and to the Hollywood brass that meant weirdo.  Perhaps he was shunned.  Perhaps, too, it didn't matter much to him because he clearly had a love-hate thing with movie-making with a bent more toward hate.  He again turned to television, both guest star roles in episodic television and TV movies as angst-ridden and misunderstood youths.  His movie career would basically never again reach the heights he had known as a child star or a young adult.

In 1981 he married again, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and had a couple of kids.  He had other things that interested him, he said, besides acting.  He fell in with artists, poets and musicians.  Neil Young and Dennis Hopper were two of his buddies.  

In the mid 80's, Stockwell appeared in three films that garnered some attention... Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, David Lynch's Dune and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.  It was nice to see him again although the roles were not as prominent as most of his previous work.  In 1986 he appeared in Lynch's neo-noir thriller, Blue Velvet.

In 1988 he received a supporting Oscar nomination for his cigar-chomping mafia boss in the comedy Married to the Mob.  He has said it's his favorite of all his roles.  A year later he played a general on the TV series, Quantum Leap, which lasted for five years.

From 1989 til 2015 he continued appearing on television and made movies I have never heard of.  They must have opened and closed on the same day or went straight to video.  At least he kept working... into his eighth decade.  Mighty impressive.

Stockwell created digitally-enhanced photographs and collages and his work was presented at exhibits and galleries.  He has long been a concerned environmentalist.  In 2017 he had a stroke and has been, more or less, inactive since.

I have always been crazy about that kid actor.  No matter what few fine films he made as an adult, it is those childhood movies I will always adore the most.  He was such an intelligent little actor.