- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJames Byron Dean
- Nicknames
- Jimmy Dean
- "One-Speed Dean"
- JD
- Height5′ 7½″ (1.71 m)
- James Byron Dean was born February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana, to Mildred Marie (Wilson) and Winton A. Dean, a farmer turned dental technician. His mother died when Dean was nine, and he was subsequently raised on a farm by his aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Indiana. After grade school, he moved to New York to pursue his dream of acting. He received rave reviews for his work as the blackmailing Arab boy in the New York production of Gide's "The Immoralist", good enough to earn him a trip to Hollywood. His early film efforts were strictly small roles: a sailor in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis overly frantic musical comedy Sailor Beware (1952); a GI in Samuel Fuller's moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets! (1951) and a youth in the Piper Laurie-Rock Hudson comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952).
He had major roles in only three movies. In the Elia Kazan production of John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955) he played Cal Trask, the bad brother who could not force affection from his stiff-necked father. His true starring role, the one which fixed his image forever in American culture, was that of the brooding red-jacketed teenager Jim Stark in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955). George Stevens' filming of Edna Ferber's Giant (1956), in which he played the non-conforming cowhand Jett Rink who strikes it rich when he discovers oil, was just coming to a close when Dean, driving his Porsche Spyder race car, collided with another car while on the road near Cholame, California on September 30, 1955. He had received a speeding ticket just two hours before. At age 24, James Dean was killed almost immediately from the impact from a broken neck. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
- ChildrenNo Children
- ParentsMildred WilsonWinton Dean
- RelativesLaurie Oldenstål(Cousin)
- Frequently played angry youths
- Squinty, sleepy blue eyes
- Light brown hair greased back
- Impulsive emotional acting style
- Known for playing well-meaning but deeply troubled characters
- He is the only actor in history to receive more than one Oscar nomination posthumously.
- Rolf Weütherich, the German auto mechanic who was riding with Dean in the passenger seat during his fatal auto crash, was thrown from the car by the impact and received multiple injuries. After Dean's death, he fell into a depression from the trauma of the incident and made several suicide attempts. He died in Germany in 1981 in an auto accident similar to the one that James Dean died in.
- He was terribly nearsighted and wore thick glasses when not on the screen.
- On the night Dean was killed, four of his co-stars: Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, Nick Adams and Richard Davalos, were all having dinner together in New York. The conversation turned to Dean, his new Porsche, and speculation that his speeding would cause him to have an accident during the coming year.
- He was issued a speeding ticket only two hours and fifteen minutes before his fatal accident.
- Only the gentle are ever really strong.
- Gratification comes in the doing, not in the results.
- Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.
- An actor must interpret life and, in order to do so, must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet. In the short span of his lifetime, an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible. He must be superhuman in his efforts to store away in the core of his subconscious everything that he might be called upon to use in the expression of his art.
- It was an accident, although I've been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child: in school, music, athletics. To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.
- Giant (1956) - $21,000 ($1500 per week)
- Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - $10,000
- East of Eden (1955) - $1,000 /week
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