While United Artists and the film’s producer and director, Michael Cimino, would never recover from the film’s financial and critical failings, some of the Western’s cast would go on to enjoy later success.
Kris Kristofferson
The American musician, songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson played the film’s protagonist, Sheriff James Averill. Already an established actor, Kris had made his film debut some ten years earlier in The Last Movie. But despite his later success, he admitted in a 2004 interview with the Los Angeles Times, that for a while his role in Cimino’s film made him “unmarketable.”
Christopher Walken
Starring alongside Kris in Heaven’s Gate, was the Academy and BAFTA award-winning actor, Christopher Walken, best known for his roles in Catch Me If You Can, Batman Returns, Pulp Fiction and more.
Just a few years before Heaven’s Gate, Christopher had worked with Cimino in The Deer Hunter, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In Heaven’s Gate Christopher played Nate Champion, a cattleman and hired gun based on a real figure in the Johnson County War.
Yet for all its criticism, Walken admitted in a 2012 interview with IndieWire that he “always thought it was good.”
He said: “That movie always seemed disproportionately beat up at the time ... I never understood it.”
Isabelle Huppert
While Kris and Christopher were already established American actors prior to the release of Heaven’s Gate, the Western film marked an international film debut for French actress Isabelle Huppert who played the film’s heroine, Ella Watson. Isabelle has since gone on to feature in other English-language films, most recently in 2022 as Claudine Colbert in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.