Tony Earnshaw: Everybody's favourite wacko who was born – and lived – to be wild

When he died, last weekend, at 74, in his home in Venice, California – a bizarre sealed compound packed with art treasures collected over the years – Hopper had travelled full circle.

In the Fifties, he enjoyed some early roles in film and TV and was seen as an intense young actor in the mode of his idol, James Dean, with whom he appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.

There were stand-out bit parts in Gunfight at the OK Corral (with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) and The Sons of Katie Elder (with John Wayne). He was a face in the background heat of Cool Hand Luke. And he drifted through Hang 'em High, with Clint Eastwood.

Then came Easy Rider, a film that forever changed the face of Hollywood film-making and helped to usher in an entirely new identity for idiosyncratic, combative film-makers.

This was a film drenched in weed and cocaine. In partnership with Peter Fonda and, in his break-out role, Jack Nicholson, co-writer/

director Hopper brought the counter-culture movement to every average all-American kid on the block.

There are those who believe Hopper's closeness to Dean galvanised him into seeking an heirdom that was not rightfully his. Was he trying to prove something – that he could be the equal to Dean, whose genius had been so cruelly snuffed out in a car crash when he was 24?

He followed Easy Rider with The Last Movie, a film renowned for its laboured impenetrability and ber pretensions. After that, Hopper spent the '70s in a haze of drugs and drink; catch his performance in Apocalypse Now for proof. The super-rich rebel genius gave the world the finger.

He re-emerged in the '80s thinner, greyer and looking older than his years. Given the punishment he had imposed upon his body, he really had no right to be alive. Yet he astounded friends, enemies and critics alike with two brilliant performances: as the drunken coach in Hoosiers, and as mad-eyed Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

Thus it was that Frank Booth – crazed, murderous and high as a kite – provided rehabilitation for a man whose vision and ability had too long been enveloped within a dense cloud of noxious drug abuse.

At the age of 50, Dennis Hopper was back. Perhaps he didn't enjoy the career he had once envisaged – there were too many wackos, nutjobs and crazies for that in films like Speed and Waterworld – but he worked solidly.

Every actor needs a shtick. It doesn't matter if Hopper's was built around a succession of loonies. What does matter is that he went spectacularly off the rails, stumbled back to civilisation, re-discovered himself and gave us chickens the vicarious joy of watching him self-destruct all over again on the movie screen.

He did it all, and never once looked back in regret. Then again, he probably couldn't remember any of it…