"Singing and acting are actually very similar things. Anyone can sing and anyone can be a film actor. All you have to do is learn."

"I learned to sing when I was a child I had a babysitter named Thelma. She was 18, I was six, and I was in love with her. I used to sing her an old Jimmie Rodgers song, 'T for Thelma.' [He sings:] 'T for Texas, T for Tennessee, T for Thelma, that girl made a wreck out of me.' [He smiles:] I was singing the blues when I was six. Kind of sad, eh?"

Blogged here in 2013. He was Harry Dean Stanton, who died yesterday at the age of 91. Here's the NYT obit. Excerpt:

[H]e remained largely unknown to the general public until 1984, when the seemingly impossible, or at least the unexpected, happened: Mr. Stanton, the quintessential supporting player, became a leading man.

That year he starred as a wandering amnesiac reunited with his family in Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and as a fast-talking automobile thief training Emilio Estevez in the ways of his world in Alex Cox’s cult comedy “Repo Man.”...

Mr. Stanton was never anonymous again, although he continued to make his contributions almost entirely in supporting roles. He played Molly Ringwald’s underemployed father in the teenage romance “Pretty in Pink” (1986), the apostle Paul in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), a private eye in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), a judge in Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998), the hero’s ailing brother in Mr. Lynch’s “The Straight Story” (1999), a veteran inmate cheerfully testing the electrocution equipment in “The Green Mile” (1999) and Charlie Sheen’s father in “The Big Bounce” (2004)... [and] Roman Grant, a self-proclaimed prophet with 14 wives, on [HBO's] “Big Love”...