Dean Stockwell (5 March 1936 – 7 November 2021)

Dean Stockwell started out young in the business and continued on for another seven decades.  Among his earliest roles was opposite Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh (1945) as a little boy who wants to join the Navy.

He went on to play the Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948) and of course alongside Margret O'Brien in the Secret Garden (Fred Wilcox, 1949).  I first remember seeing him with Errol Flynn in Kim (Victor Saville, 1950).  Of his work as an adult he's most famous for Compulsion (Richard Fleischer, 1959) and as Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962). 

He won the Cannes Film Festival best actor award for both of these roles.  Of course he never received an Academy Award, though he was nominated once, and then only as Supporting Actor, late in his career, for Married to the Mob (Jonathan Demme, 1988).

He should be best remembered, however for the two films he made with David Lynch, as Dr Wellington Yueh in DUNE (1984) and as Ben in Blue Velvet (1987). He's perfect and completely different from one to the next in both roles. Let's hear it for Ben, but above all: Remember the Tooth!

RIP.