(Credit: Alamy)

During the 1960s, an increased interest in drug use, sexual freedom and progressive politics bewitched the youth, leading to the hippie movement. Dennis Hopper dove headfirst into the world of drugs and alcohol, but he knew that the optimism spouted by hippies was futile. His directorial debut, Easy Rider, captured the dying breaths of the era, starring alongside Peter Fonda as a motorcycle rider travelling through the freeing expanses of the USA.

Unfortunately, the characters both suffer tragic fates, with Hopper pointing out the false promises set out by America, supposedly the land of the free. The film’s bleak end put it in a category of new movies that went against Hollywood norms. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider was brutal and explicit – there was no happy ending or positive moral message that conquered. Hopper showed how tough life can be, even when you try to live outside of the rules and regulations forced upon you by higher powers. 

Hopper certainly struggled throughout his life, often turning to drugs and alcohol to cope. He lived a wild life, throwing away much of his potential to be one of the 20th century’s greatest directors due to his constant reliance on illegal substances, particularly acid and cocaine, which subsequently made him act in erratic and sometimes shocking ways.

After Easy Rider, he starred in movies like True Grit, Mad Dog Morgan, The American Friend, Apocalypse Now and Out of the Blue, the latter of which he directed. Yet, in between – or even on set – he did things that gave him a notorious reputation. When he appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, he requested to be supplied with lots of cocaine as a form of payment, and when he was preparing to star in a movie called Jungle Warriors in 1984, he ended up walking around a forest on acid, completely naked, asking police to shoot him.

However, one of the weirdest stories came when Hopper was yet again surrounded by nature and on acid, although this time, he actually did something rather odd. According to Tom Folsom, Hopper’s biographer, “Hopper won LSD in a poker game, dropped it, and, while tripping, shot a .357 into a tree, thinking the tree was a grizzly bear. He then fled the scene, but was eventually arrested and put in the same jail in which he filmed a scene in Easy Rider.”

In Easy Rider, Hopper and Fonda’s characters get put in jail for reasons a lot less dramatic than Hopper’s actual cause of arrest. After they join a parade on their motorcycles, riding between trumpeters and dancers, they are arrested for “parading without a licence”. While Hopper’s character, Billy, does do many Hopper-esque things in the film, like having a wild acid trip with some prostitutes, it seems as though he couldn’t top the actor’s real-life activities.

Hopper ended up getting clean in the 1980s, and he experienced a career resurgence. Starring in movies like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where he played a terrifying, gas-huffing psychopath, as well as True Romance and Speed, the actor managed to subdue his wild tendencies, at least off-screen.