Dean Stockwell, actor best known for the hit time-travel series Quantum Leap and David Lynch’s noir film Blue Velvet – obituary

Dean Stockwell, who has died aged 85, started out as a child actor and later appeared in the time-travelling American television series Quantum Leap as Rear Admiral Albert “Al” Calavicci, the “hologram” adviser of Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) who not only leaps through time but also tries to change history by occupying the bodies of the people he encounters; the show ran for five seasons (1989-93) creating one of television’s great double acts, with Bakula’s character being a man of impeccable moral fibre while Stockwell’s was a cigar-smoking womaniser.

During a 70-year career Stockwell had a notable success in David Lynch’s neo-noir thriller Blue Velvet (1986), one of several collaborations with Dennis Hopper; and he was nominated for an Oscar as the dapper mafia don Tony “the Tiger” Russo, who has eyes for Michelle Pfeiffer’s sexy widow in the comedy Married to the Mob (1988). “Some people might pooh-pooh it and say it didn’t mean anything, but it does,” he said of the accolade.

Yet his most testing role was perhaps as Paul Morel, D H Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical character, in Sons and Lovers (1960), starring Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller as his warring parents. It was the first time he been asked to adopt an English accent and he was happy, because “I was not criticised for being an American in it … so I felt it was quite an accomplishment”.

Robert Dean Stockwell was born in North Hollywood, California, on March 5 1936, the younger of two sons of Harry Stockwell, a Broadway actor who voiced the prince in the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and his wife Betty, who had worked in vaudeville; his brother, Guy, was also an actor.

Their father was appearing in Oklahoma! when he learnt that child actors were required for a stage production of Paul Osborn’s The Innocent Voyage. The brothers were both accepted and though the play soon closed it led to Stockwell getting a contract with MGM. His film debut was in The Valley of Decision (1945) starring Gregory Peck and Greer Garson, who was nominated for an Oscar.

An (uncredited) early appearance came the same year in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, in which the comedy duo walked through the studio’s school room where Stockwell was sitting with Margaret O’Brien and Elizabeth Taylor. “I wouldn’t say I had a crush on her,” he said of Taylor. “But I had an appreciative eye for her.”

Many roles were too serious for his liking, including as Peck’s son in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) directed by Elia Kazan, who suggested that to start the tears flowing he should think of a puppy dying. “I would always ask: ‘Is there a crying scene in the movie?’ And there almost always was, and then I would be totally depressed about that,” he said.

Other parts included a misfit whose hair changes colour in The Boy With Green Hair (1948), a depressed rich child in The Secret Garden (1949), and the title role in Kim (1950) based on Rudyard Kipling’s colonial classic with Errol Flynn, a practical joker who on one occasion during filming handed him a plate of steaming camel dung instead of a bowl of food.

He dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, and avoided military service by taking drugs and feigning homosexuality. For the next few years he drifted, repairing railway tracks and picking fruit, before restarting his acting career at 21 on American television.

His adult forays into film included appearing alongside Orson Welles and Bradford Dillman in Compulsion (1959), based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, which won him the first of two best actor awards at Cannes, the other being for Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962). In Rapture (1965) he played an escaped convict who is befriended by a farmer and his lonely teenage daughter, and in Psych-Out (1968) with Susan Strasberg and Jack Nicholson he was a long-haired, guru-like figure.

Stockwell flew to Peru (“a wild time”) to appear in Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971), reinforcing a friendship that began on the early 1960s TV series The Greatest Show in Earth. He was also seen in the biker movie The Loners (1972), the Watergate-themed horror flick The Werewolf of Washington (1973), and the racetrack comedy Win, Place or Steal (1974). However, subsequent years were bleak and in the 1980s he acquired a licence to sell property.

The success of Married to the Mob led to a revival and he was seen in Robert Altman’s black comedy The Player (1992), as Madonna’s father in Madonna: Innocence Lost (1994) and in the political thriller Air Force One (1997). Quantum Leap and his role in the futuristic television series Battlestar Galactica (2006-09) made him a popular figure at science-fiction conventions. He retired to Taos, New Mexico, in 2015, creating collages, smoking Cuban cigars and playing golf.

In 1960 Stockwell married Millie Perkins, who had starred in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); the marriage was dissolved in 1962 after which he “did some drugs and went to some love-ins”. His second marriage, in 1981 to Joy Marchenko, a textile expert, was dissolved in 2004. He is survived by their daughter and son.

Dean Stockwell, born March 5 1936, died November 7 2021