“James Dean was the ultimate teenage rebel, the definitive neurotic boy outsider. His career was over almost before it had begun. He spent less than two years in Hollywood, and when he died in 1955 (at the age of twenty-four) only one of his three movies had been seen by the public. His image … seems richly symbolic of the culture of 1950s America: youthful, anxious and angry, insolent yet innocent, a Narcissus in denim, forever young. Andy Warhol described Dean’s image as “the damaged but beautiful soul of our time.” His movies show him coping with the perennial teenage problems of coming to terms with sexuality, establishing a working relationship with parents and trying to find a place in the world, all against a background of a vague and generalised air of discontent with the family, authority and the status quo. More than any other actor, Dean distilled the essence of youthful non-belonging – in the same sense as Holden Caulfield meant it – for teenagers in the West. His life was as alienated as that of the characters in his movies. His appeal was not so much to a sex as to an age group. What he offered was a rallying-point against the adult world of corruption and disenchantment.”
Born 95 years ago today: cinema’s quintessential doomed bongo drum-playing 1950s bad boy and personification of teenage angst, James Byron Dean (8 February 1931 – 30 September 1955) – one of the most lusciously photogenic actors of all time. Pictured: Dean during production of his final film Giant (1956).
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