Peter Fonda in Easy Rider is a counterculture image as quintessentially American as the Statue of Liberty

It’s a counterculture image as quintessentially American as the Statue of Liberty itself: Peter Fonda with the stars and stripes helmet on his Harley-Davidson, riding free and easy across the desert with a bearded, straggly haired Dennis Hopper in a cowboy hat beside him in Easy Rider (1969).

Fonda died this week almost exactly 50 years after the release of Easy Rider, the film that defined his career and eclipsed everything he did subsequently. He co-wrote, produced, and starred in what was to become the most celebrated biker movie in history. Hopper directed but Fonda thought up the project

As Fonda later recalled, the inspiration for Easy Rider came after he heard the pugnacious but strait-laced Jack Valenti, recently appointed president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), make a speech.The MPAA was the trade body which represented the interests of the Hollywood studios. By 1969, Valenti decided there had been far too much promiscuity in American cinema. “We have to stop making movies about motorcycles, sex and drugs and make more movies like Dr Dolittle.”

Fonda, who had already starred in the successful Roger Corman produced biker film The Wild Angels (1966), responded with Easy Rider, the ultimate sex, drugs and biking movie. Its runaway box office success encouraged the usually conservative studios to back maverick young talent and ushered in the golden period in American filmmaking in the 1970s chronicled in Peter Biskind’s 1998 book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Directors like Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and even George Lucas were indirect beneficiaries of the revolution that Fonda launched with Easy Rider.

Fonda himself, though, didn’t blossom forth in the way that might have been expected. He directed and starred in The Hired Hand (1971), a brooding, experimental western edited by Frank Mazzola (who had just edited Performance for Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell). The film only really found favour when it was re-released in a restored version over seen by Mazzola and British producer Hamish McAlpine in 2001.

Fonda also directed an enigmatic sci-fi movie, Idaho Transfer (1973) but for much of the 1970s, he was a jobbing action star. He didn’t direct again until 1979 when he made another western, Wanda Nevada, in which he starred alongside his father, Henry Fonda and a teenage Brooke Shields.

Compared to the careers of his father and to his sister, Jane Fonda, Peter’s own achievements look relatively slim. Nonetheless, he was a talented actor in his own right. He sounded and looked a little bit like his father. As the bee keeper in Sundance hit Ulee’s Gold (1997), a Vietnam vet now living in the Florida swamps and trying to keep his family together in very difficult circumstances, Fonda showed a resilience, decency and gravity that couldn’t help you make but think of Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath (1940).

Occasionally in his later films, Fonda would also show some of the old born-to-be-wild swagger of Easy Rider days. For example, he was very striking as the sleazy, charismatic LA record producer Terry Valentine in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999).

Look through Fonda’s lengthy filmography and you’ll see many B movies, forgettable action flicks and titles which have already passed into obscurity. However, he was the originator of Easy Rider, one of the most influential films in Hollywood history, and no one can take that away from him.