Memorial Page for James Dean (née James Byron Dean)

James Dean (born February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana; died September 30, 1955, near Cholame, California) was an American actor. He played only three major film roles: Cal Trask in East of Eden, Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause and Jett Rink in Giant. Only the first of these films was released in his lifetime; the other two came out after he was killed in a car crash at the age of 24. He was the first man to be nominated for an Academy Award after his death, and he remains the only actor to have received two such nominations.

Childhood in California and Indiana

James Byron Dean was the only child of Winton Dean and Mildred Marie Wilson. When he was six, the family moved to Santa Monica, California, where his father worked as a dental technician. His mother nurtured him in the arts from an early age, with music, puppet shows and dance; James learned the violin and tap-danced on stage. For one of their games she built him a cardboard theater, and with paper dolls as actors the two of them took turns making up plays and stories.

Mildred Dean developed cancer and died on July 14, 1940, at the age of 29; her son was nine. His father felt unable to raise the boy on his own and accepted an offer from his sister Ortense and her husband, Marcus Winslow, to take him in at Fairmount, Indiana. James traveled east with his grandmother on the same train that carried his mother's body home.

The Winslows lived on a farm just outside Fairmount and kept a Quaker household. They already had a daughter, Joan, but had always wanted a son as well, and they welcomed James gladly. Because he liked their maple bedroom furniture, they even gave him their own room. In 1948 he wrote about his mother in an essay for his school principal: “Mom became ill and passed out of my life at the age of nine.” About his future, he wrote: “I think my life will be devoted to art and dramatics.”

Fairmount and Adeline Nall

At Fairmount High School, Dean played basketball and baseball, acted in school productions and took part in speech contests. For six years his teacher Adeline Nall taught him drama and speech; she encouraged him, stood up for him when he got into trouble and pushed him toward greater challenges. With “The Madman's Story”, a monologue after Charles Dickens, he became Indiana's state champion in dramatic declamation in the spring of 1949. At the national contest in Longmont, Colorado, at the end of April, he placed sixth; only the top five reached the final. Nall later saw this setback as an important lesson on his way to New York and Hollywood. Dean graduated in May 1949.

From California to Broadway

After graduating, Dean moved to California to live with his father and stepmother. He enrolled at Santa Monica City College as a pre-law student and in 1950 spent a semester at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied drama. In January 1951 he left university to become a full-time actor. After a few bit parts in Hollywood films he moved to New York; on the way, in October 1951, he stopped in Fairmount to see Adeline Nall once more.

In New York he appeared in more than two dozen television productions between 1952 and 1955 and was accepted into Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. On December 3, 1952, he made his Broadway debut in See the Jaguar at the Cort Theatre. On his 23rd birthday, February 8, 1954, The Immoralist, based on André Gide's novel, opened on Broadway; Dean played the young servant Bachir and won a Theatre World Award for the role.

East of Eden

Screenwriter Paul Osborn had seen Dean in The Immoralist and suggested him to Elia Kazan for the role of Cal Trask in East of Eden, the film of John Steinbeck's novel. In March 1954 Kazan offered him the part. Cal is the unloved son who fights for his father's approval. Kazan later wrote in his autobiography that he told Osborn “this kid actually was Cal”. When the two arrived in Los Angeles to begin production, Kazan went with Dean to visit his father and saw how much the son wanted to please him.

Julie Harris played opposite him, and Raymond Massey played his father. In the scene in which the father refuses the money Cal has earned for him, the script called for Dean simply to turn and walk away. Instead he embraced Massey in tears, and Kazan kept the cameras rolling. The film opened in New York on March 9, 1955, and made Dean a star; it reached German cinemas in July 1955. In 1956 the Golden Globes honored him with a special award for the role.

In February 1955, Dean returned to Fairmount one last time, accompanied by Life photographer Dennis Stock. Adeline Nall asked him whether she should try New York herself. After a long speech about what an art acting is, he told her: “By all means.” She went and spent two years acting on the New York stage, off Broadway.

1955: Racing, a Rebel and a Giant

Dean had become interested in motor racing in 1954. At the end of March 1955 he drove his first race in Palm Springs, followed by Bakersfield and Santa Barbara in May. On March 28, 1955, filming began on Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray; Dean played the teenager Jim Stark, alongside Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. By the end of May he was already in front of the camera for George Stevens' Giant, with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and a young Dennis Hopper, playing the ranch hand Jett Rink. During the filming of Giant, Warner Bros. barred him from all racing.

On the set of Giant, dressed as Jett Rink, Dean gave a short interview to actor Gig Young for the television series Warner Bros. Presents. Young asked him for advice for young drivers, and Dean replied: “Take it easy driving … the life you might save might be mine.”

On September 21, 1955, he bought a Porsche 550 Spyder at Competition Motors in Hollywood and entered it in a race at Salinas on October 1 and 2.

September 30, 1955

On September 30, 1955, Dean set out from Los Angeles for Salinas in the Spyder, with the German Porsche mechanic Rolf Wütherich beside him. In the early evening, at an intersection near Cholame, an oncoming car turned left across his path. There was no time to stop and no room to swerve. James Dean was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. at the hospital in Paso Robles. He was 24 years old. Rolf Wütherich survived with serious injuries. On October 11, 1955, a coroner's jury in San Luis Obispo found that the death was an accident with no criminal intent.

His funeral took place on October 8, 1955, at the Fairmount Friends Church. Some 600 people were inside the church, and about 2,400 more gathered outside. Six of his classmates from Fairmount High School carried the coffin. James Dean was buried at Park Cemetery in Fairmount.

After His Passing

At the end of October 1955, Rebel Without a Cause opened in American cinemas; in Germany it followed in March 1956. A cult grew up around him, above all among young people. In October 1956 the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Warner Bros. was receiving 8,000 letters a month addressed to “James Dean, Hollywood”.

Giant premiered in New York on October 10, 1956, and reached German cinemas in December 1956. After his death, a few of his lines in the film had to be voiced by another actor. For both films, Dean was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor: in 1956 for East of Eden and in 1957 for Giant. The awards went to Ernest Borgnine and Yul Brynner.

In Germany, readers of the youth magazine BRAVO voted him their favorite actor in 1957, the first time they chose their favorite stars, ahead of Horst Buchholz and Burt Lancaster. That same year the Golden Globes named him World Film Favorite. In all three films, his German voice was Dietmar Schönherr.

Remembrance

In Fairmount, a memorial bears an inscription that begins: “This is not a monument to a rebel, those were only roles he played”. Every year in late September the town holds a James Dean Festival; in 2026 it took place for the 50th time.

In Cholame, the Japanese businessman Seita Ohnishi from Kobe had a metal memorial built around a tree in 1977. Ohnishi had admired Dean ever since seeing East of Eden. The intersection itself has been named the James Dean Memorial Junction since September 30, 2005.

In front of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, one of the locations of Rebel Without a Cause, stands a bronze bust by the sculptor Kenneth Kendall, whose studio Dean had visited in January 1955. At a tribute on the 25th anniversary of his death, actor Martin Sheen recalled that people said Marlon Brando had changed the way people acted, and added: “That may be true, but James Dean changed the way people lived.”