Luke Perry

Luke Perry arrived in Los Angeles with little more than a suitcase and the patience of someone with no Plan B. Before becoming the face that plastered the casting folders of half of Spain, he worked for a paving company and at a doorknob factory. He wasn't chasing instant glory but a paycheck that would let him pay for acting classes in a city that devours newcomers.

He auditioned 256 times before landing his first steady role.

He didn't have the classic leading-man looks of a square jaw. But his tired gaze and that suburban James Dean vibe fit perfectly with a Fox network desperate to compete with the major traditional networks. So when Aaron Spelling set his sights on him, he knew that this kid from Ohio was the missing piece to complete a teen puzzle.

The Long Sideburns Phenomenon

In 1990, the series Beverly Hills, 90210 launched him into a kind of fame that is hard to quantify today without social media. Perry played Dylan McKay. He was the bad boy with alcohol problems and an absent father who lived alone in a luxury hotel. The pressure of success was suffocating from the very first minute on air.

Spanish audiences knew him as Sensación de vivir.

At an autograph signing at a shopping mall in Florida, they had to smuggle him out in a dumpster. More than 10,000 teenagers tried to flip his car just to touch the window. Because Perry wasn't just a television actor. He had become a mass-market product that he himself could barely understand.

He decided to leave the series in 1995 to pursue more substantial film roles. He wanted to shake off the teen magazine heartthrob label that followed him everywhere. In 1994 he starred in 8 Seconds, playing real-life bull rider Lane Frost. He trained for months to perform his own stunts alongside half-ton animals.

The Maturity Behind the Dad

Still, movies never gave him the room his talent seemed to deserve. He appeared in The Fifth Element in 1997 with a brief role in the prologue of the Luc Besson film. It was a token appearance that did little to revive his big-screen career. He returned to television in 1998 because bills and being forgotten wait for no one in Hollywood.

And the bet on maturity paid off.

The passing years were good to his acting range. In the HBO series Oz, he showed a much rawer and more vulnerable side. He was no longer the guy with the motorcycle and the leather jacket. He was a character actor who accepted his place in the industry without the hunger of his twenties. In 2017, he took on the role of Fred Andrews in Riverdale.

He played the lead character's father. He was the moral anchor of a story full of neon and absurd plot twists. The producers wrote the character with his natural warmth and his ability to convey calm on screen in mind. He earned $200,000 per episode during the most successful stretches of the production.

His last big-screen appearance was under the direction of Quentin Tarantino. In 2019 he filmed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, playing actor Wayne Maunder. It was a relaxed shoot, sharing the set with the biggest stars of the moment. He never got to see the final cut of the film in theaters.

He died in March 2019 after suffering a massive stroke.

He was 52 years old. His final wish, technically speaking, was to be buried in an eco-friendly suit made of mushrooms on his farm in Tennessee. The cost of the biodegradable burial was approximately $1,500.