Slash reacted to the death of actor Seymour Cassel on his Instagram. Cassel is a legend in the Guns N’ Roses community, as he gave Slash his name when he was still known as Saul Hudson.
“RIP to my old friend #SeymourCassel.”
Slash told Metal Hammer in 2012, “My best friend’s dad is an actor named Seymour Cassel, and we used to ditch school and hang out at his house and he used to call me Slash and it was just habitual with him.”
The Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver icon says the nickname began to stick as time went on, but he never questioned Cassel about it until years later. “I was on tour in Europe and I happened to run into him and we went to dinner,” says Slash. “He told me that he called me Slash, cause I had to ask him, and he says it was always because I was in a hurry, hustling whatever it was I was hustling at the time and never had time to sit and chat. I was always sort of in passing and he just started calling me Slash.”
Cassel first came to prominence in the 1960s in the pioneering independent films of writer/director John Cassavetes. The first of these was Too Late Blues (1961), followed by Faces (1968), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a National Society of Film Critics Award. Cassel went on to appear in Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984).
He died on Sunday at 84 years old.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwCzIhTgIPN/
