Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton played Travis in Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, a broken man who walks out of the desert after four years and does not speak for the film's first half hour. The BFI writes that he gave Travis a transparency, bringing numbness and self-abandonment into being through a vacancy that says a great deal. What he put into Bud in Repo Man is pragmatism, self-assurance and a sardonic amusement. Across a career spanning sixty years he said he had done between two hundred and two hundred and fifty jobs in film and television, and his work is taken as a lesson in doing much with little. He was the engineer Brett in Alien, the swindling preacher Asa Hawks in Wise Blood, Andie's father in Pretty in Pink and the detective Johnnie Farragut in Wild at Heart.