Mad about the boy

DURING his brief life, James Dean was already on the way to becoming an icon. With his leather jacket, quiff, cigarette rolling along the bottom lip, sneering at authority, he was the cool outsider, the rebel who did what he wanted, giving a voice, however mumbling, to the emerging teenage America.

After his death, his status was assured. His image on posters and t-shirts became as much a fixture in student bedrooms as that of Che Guevara. Red jackets identical to the one Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause sold by the thousand. Locations used in the film became overnight tourist attractions. A minor label put out a record His Name Was Dean, and saw it sell 25,000 copies in a week.

And such was the strength of his myth that many refused to believe he had really died. Rumours that Dean was disfigured but still alive were given currency in gossip columns. Others claimed it was not Dean but a hitchhiker who had been killed, and the actor was in hiding while he learned to use his artificial limbs.

Even today, 50 years after the car crash which claimed his life, Dean still exerts a powerful hold, his influence apparent both in teenage culture and for the actors in debt to his legacy: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman among them, not to mention musicians including Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison who have sought inspiration from a man who was barely at the start of his career.

James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana. His family ran a farm but his father Winton later became a dental technician. When Dean was five, the family moved to Los Angeles, but in 1940 his mother Mildred died of cancer. Jimmy was sent back to Indiana to live with relatives, riding in the same train as his mother's body, while his father stayed in California, failing to return for the funeral.

After graduating from high school, Dean moved back out to Los Angeles to live with his father and stepmother, but when he changed from studying law to drama he was thrown out of the family home. He began his acting career with a Coca Cola television commercial, but struggled to get work and took a job as a parking lot attendant to pay the bills.

IN 1951 he moved to New York to try his luck on the stage, and won a place under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, at the forefront of the method acting revolution which was sweeping America, and which had already seen Marlon Brando take the theatre world by storm.

Dean's Broadway debut was in the critically-panned and short-lived See the Jaguar, but, after a number of television roles and four uncredited bit parts in largely-forgotten films, it was his second Broadway appearance which led to Hollywood. Just two weeks into his run as a bisexual Arab street boy in The Immoralist, Dean was offered the role of Caleb Trask in East of Eden, Elia Kazan's film of the John Steinbeck novel.

It was the start of a brief but glorious Hollywood career. It was also to be the only film released before his death. The following year, 1955, he starred in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, but had just finished filming on the latter when he was killed.

His new-found fame and success allowed him to indulge his love of fast cars, and his passion for racing. He was on his way to a race meeting at Salinas in California, just hours after taking delivery of a silver Porsche Spyder 550, on State Highway 466, now renamed Highway 46.

As he approached the junction with Highway 41, at a speed later estimated at 85mph, a Ford driven by student Donald Turnupseed pulled out in front of him. The two cars collided almost head-on. The Porsche ended up in a ditch, looking "like a crumpled pack of cigarettes" according to photographer Stanford Roth, who was on the scene within minutes.

Dean suffered a broken neck and numerous broken bones and was dead when he arrived at hospital. Turnupseed escaped with a cut forehead. Rolf Wutherich, a mechanic in the passenger seat of the Porsche, was thrown from the wreckage and sustained a smashed jaw, broken leg and multiple cuts and bruises.

EVEN though he had only completed three movies, his death had a devastating effect. He was already a promising actor, and symbolised the emerging teenage generation, as well as a new style of acting. He was nominated for an Oscar for his work on East of Eden, the first actor to be posthumously nominated, and also for Giant. But his influence spread much further than the annals of the Academy.

"A lot of his importance was due to the period in which he was active," according to Dr Ian Inglis, senior lecturer in sociology at Northumbria University. "The early 1950s was a period of enormous social and cultural change, particularly in the United States, rebuilding and settling down after the war.

"It is significant that a lot of the pop culture icons who emerged in the early to mid 50s - Brando, Elvis Presley, Dean - continue to have such an impact 50 years later. When we look back at them, we're not just looking back at individuals, but at an exciting, vibrant and disruptive time."

Dean's status grew from his performance of a new kind of character, the disaffected teenager, the rebellious youth, at a time when teenage and youth culture was only just emerging. The old assumptions that you went to school and when you finished school you went to work were being challenged by the recognition of a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood. "It couldn't have been done at any other time," Dr Inglis says.

"It is important not to overstate it - it wasn't the case that every young man and young woman suddenly adopted a rebellious posture, but the experiences of the war in particular had alerted young people to the possibility of there being alternatives and what those might be."

The early and mid-50s was also a time of heightened tension between the two new superpowers, a real fear that war could be around the corner. Instead of growing up in the comfortable and safe environment expected by the previous generation, it seemed teenagers could look forward to anxiety. Doubts over what kind of future they would have merged with doubts over whether there would be a future at all to add to the confusion and uncertainties of growing up.

Dean's style of acting added to the lure of his image. Along with Brando and Montgomery Clift, he led the way in bringing method acting to the movie-going public, a belief that you should not just pretend to be someone else, but that you should actually become that person.

"It was the first time people had seen that style of acting on the big screen," says Dr Inglis. "It was a new departure in film technique, and you can see the influence of that in Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and, to an extent, Dustin Hoffman.

"You can compare its impact to the rise of the kitchen sink drama in Britain in the 1950s, in plays like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. He was writing about real people, about the working class, and the theatre hadn't seen anything like that before.

"Here was a new style for actors not to pretend to be other people but to become other people, and allow the audience not to applaud their skill but rather to identify with them."

NOR should the role of Dean's early death be neglected in ensuring his legacy was cemented. Unlike Brando, he did not endure the indignity of lapsing into roles that were beneath his talent, sliding into mediocrity and obscurity. For Dean, the triumph is that his three starring roles were substantial and interesting parts in three high quality films. Doubts over whether Dean could have made the transition from troubled youth to maturity are destined to remain unanswered.

"Maybe he would have carried on and enjoyed an enormously long career, maybe he would be en like Brando," says Dr Inglis. "Undoubtedly part of Dean's attraction is that we don't have to consider which way he could have gone. His film career is complete, his reputation as an actor is intact."

According to Humphrey Bogart: "Dean died at just the right time. He left behind a legend. If he had lived, he'd never had been able to live up to his publicity."

But if the question of what he could have gone on to achieve will always be left open, that he has been transformed in death into a timeless icon is indisputable.

Dean was buried in Fairmount, Indiana, his grave visited by thousands of people every year. Within a year of his death, almost four million people had joined his fan club. And the legend refuses to die. Earlier this week, the junction of Highways 46 and 41 was renamed the James Dean Memorial Junction.