Tad Friend: Harry Dean Stanton on Nicholson, Brando, and the Afterlife: The New Yorker Harry Dean Stanton knows how to build a silence. The character actor with the windblown hair and hound-dog face sat on the roof deck of Manhattan's Nolitan Hotel one recent afternoon, wearing a seedy black suit and smoking American Spirit cigarettes. At eighty-seven, he exhibited the self-possession of a man swimming across a vast dark lake. Every so often, he'd crush a butt under his boot, then flick it fifteen feet, over the rail. . . .