FOXNews.com - Dennis Hopper Dead at 74

FOXNews.com - Dennis Hopper Dead at 74: "Hopper then went on a colossal bender that he subsequently wasn't shy about discussing.

In 2001, the actor/filmmaker/artist talked about being sober for 18 years — and not only from booze. He did various hallucinogens and narcotics. 'I only used to do cocaine so I could sober up and drink more. My last five years of drinking was a nightmare. I was drinking a half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, in case I ran out, 28 beers a day, and three grams of cocaine just to keep me moving around. And I thought I was doing fine because I wasn't crawling around drunk on the floor.'

In the wake of that, he was quoted as saying: 'I should have been dead 10 times over. I've thought about that a lot. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around.'

Before he kicked his habits, Hopper offered a memorable performance as a nutty photographer in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

The 1980s saw a comeback by a clean and sober Hopper — culminating with David Lynch's Blue Velvet, in which he played an off-the-deep-end criminal. In 1986, he played a sad alcoholic in Hoosiers, offering a performance that brought him an Oscar nomination for supporting actor."