The romantic fascination of celebrities who die young could well begin and end with James Dean. Handsome, mercurial, essentially unknowable, working in a medium that encourages false faces and magic deception, Dean amassed a body of work so slight and so concentrated in tragic romance, his fate as pin-up boy and shorthand reference to longing and teenage rebellion was perhaps sealed even before his untimely death.
Born in small town Indiana to middle class parents, young James relocated several times between Indiana and Southern California, where he eventually gave up a pre-law degree to study acting full time. In 1952 Dean was admitted to the Actors Studio in New York, the emerging hotbed for the new Method of acting in the naturalistic style that was to revolutionize acting for a generation. Emphasizing real emotion and immersion in the role, the Method made a star of Marlon Brando, and at its peak nurtured stars from Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson to Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda, in stark contrast to the stiff formality of stars like Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton. It also provided the young, intense James Dean with a perfect excuse for channeling the apparently bottomless ennui and anger that simmered behind his brooding good looks, with that one eyebrow permanently twisted into a constant expression of tortured empathy. He was soon featured in numerous television dramas that caught the eye of Hollywood producers looking for a young leading man.
In the course of 18 months, Dean shot three films: Giant, with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, East of Eden," the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Salinas Vally epic, and the classic new realism film "Rebel Without a Cause," which was the role he would forever be associated with. It was here that he applied the Method most dramatically, brooding and shouting and crying himself hoarse as a teenager uprooted by unfeeling parents, eventually falling in with hoodlums before holing up in the LA Planetarium for a tragic conclusion. Pointless, passionate, tragic rebellion had already been done by Brando in The Wild One two years earlier, but Rebel was in color, and it was about teenagers, and Dean had died less than a month before the movie's premier. It was a perfect cosmic alliance for a legend to be born among teenage suburbanites in an increasingly disaffected consumer oriented society.
Offscreen, Dean had started racing cars, and in 1955 purchased a custom Porsche 550 Spyder, dubbed ‘Little Bastard.’ He entered a race in Salinas, and instead of trailering the car he decided to drive it to the track to get a better feel for the machine. One the way, a Ford Coupe driven by a 23 year old student crossed into Dean’s lane and hit the Porsche head-on. Dean was put in an ambulance but died en route to the hospital. He was 24 years old.
Dean’s cultural remnants have been claimed by everybody: movie buffs, disenchanted teenagers, homosexuals, and marketers. He's been plastered on posters in dorm rooms, hung on advertisements, sung into glory by John Prine, Hilary Duff, David Essex, and countless others. Unfortunately, his image is a fully owned entity of his estate, so harnessing the power of Dean's image doesn't come cheap: His estate and agency earns up to $5,000,000 a year in royalties, more than Dean ever did in his life, but a far cry from the nation's top earning dead celebrities.
As a coda: If you doubt James Dean is still of interest to the world, he easily outsearches his Giant costars, and Marlon Brando, on Google by a steady rate. He even out-searches some iconic Star Wars characters (Though he runs even steven against Darth Vader. Marilyn Monroe, however, kicks his ass, as do modern pop icons stars like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears.
James Byron Dean, actor (February 8, 1931 – September 30, 1955)
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