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James Dean
Age: 24 (passed away Sep. 30th, 1955) Height: 5' 8"
Birth Place: Marion, Indiana, USA Born: Feb. 8th, 1931
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James Dean's Main TV Roles
NOTE: Complete List of Works can be found at
IMDB
BIOGRAPHY: James Dean was raised on a farm by his aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Indiana. 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 bit parts: a sailor in the Dean Martin (I) and Jerry Lewis (I) 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 Caleb, the "bad" brother who couldn't 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 (I)' filming of Edna Ferber's Giant (1956), in which he played the non-conforming cowhand Jett Rink, was just coming to a close when Dean, driving his Porsche Spyder, collided with another car in Cholame, California. He had received a speeding ticket just two hours before. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.
TRIVIA:
- Like his hero 'Marlon Brando' (qv) (Dean had been separated from his own father as a child and was distant from him. Brando apparently served as a role model for Dean) Dean wanted to write. He told gossip columnist 'Hedda Hopper' (qv) that writing was his supreme ambition.
- At the time of his death, Dean did not leave behind a will, so most of his possessions went to his father, Winton Dean, whose relationship with him was distant at best.
- 'Elia Kazan' (qv), in his 1988 autobiography "A Life", says that during the production of _East of Eden (1955)_ (qv), he had to have Dean move into a bungalow near his on the Warner Bros. lot to keep an eye on him, so wild was his nightlife.
- Immortalized in 1974 by the song "Rock On" sung by 'David Essex (I)' (qv).
- 'Marlon Brando' (qv), in his 1994 autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me", says that Dean, who idolized him, based his acting on him and his lifestyle on what he thought Brando's lifestyle was.
- He was descended largely from early British settlers to America.
- Had a fondness for auto racing and had purchased the 1955 Porsche Spyder sports car, one of only 90 made of that year model, planning to participate in the upcoming races in Salinas, CA on Oct 1, 1955.
- (1995). Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#42).
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