Dean Stockwell
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Robert Dean Stockwell (March 5, 1936 – November 7, 2021) was an American film and television actor with a career spanning over 70 years.
Internationally he is perhaps best-known for lip syncing "Blue Velvet" (1951) in Blue Velvet (1986) with a lamp shining on his face.
Overview
As a child actor under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he first came to the public's attention in films such as Anchors Aweigh (1945), The Green Years (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Boy With Green Hair (1948), and Kim (1950).
As a young adult, he played a lead role in the 1957 Broadway and 1959 screen adaptations of Compulsion and in 1962, Stockwell played Edmund Tyrone in the film version of Long Day's Journey into Night, for which he won a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He appeared in supporting roles in such films as Dune (1984), Paris, Texas (1984), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Blue Velvet (1986), and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). He received further critical acclaim for his performance in Married to the Mob (1988), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently had roles in The Player (1992), and Air Force One (1997).
His television roles include playing Rear Admiral Albert "Al" Calavicci in Quantum Leap (1989–1993) and Brother Cavil in the Sci Fi Channel revival of Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009). Following his roles on Quantum Leap and Battlestar Galactica, Stockwell appeared at numerous science fiction conventions.