His full name was James Byron Dean, some people knew it as Jimmy Dean. He was an American film actor, the best-known as a movie icon and star of Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden and Giant. James Dean was born on February 8, 1931, at the Seven Gables apartment house in Marion, Indiana. After grade school, he moved to New York to be an actor. His early film efforts were strictly bit parts: a sailor in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis overly frantic musical comedy Sailor Beware; a GI in Samuel Fuller's moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, and a youth in the Piper Laurie-Rock Hudson comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal.
Dean was the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and remains the only actor to have had two posthumous acting nominations. He was a sexually ambiguous, sensitively intelligent Angry Young Man whose dramatic intensity lit up a generation of filmgoers.
Dean's enduring fame and popularity rests on performances in only these three films, all leading roles. He had major roles in only three movies. In the Elia Kazan production of John Steinbeck's East od Eden 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. George Stevens' filming of Edna Ferber's Giant.
Giant was his last movie, 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, 1955He had received a speeding ticket just two hours before. James Dean was killed almost immediately from the impact from a broken neck. He was 24. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.
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