James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana, the only child of Winton Dean, a dental technician, and Mildred Wilson Dean. When James was four, his mother developed uterine cancer; she died when he was nine. His father, unable to care for him while working on the West Coast, sent James to live with his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, on their farm in Fairmount, Indiana. The loss of his mother at nine — the sudden subtraction of the most essential bond — would echo through his performances in ways that critics and audiences felt without always being able to articulate.
Dean attended Fairmount High School, where he acted in school plays and competed in basketball, baseball, and track, before relocating to Los Angeles after graduation to live with his father and pursue acting. He studied briefly at UCLA before dropping out and making his way to New York, where he studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg — the method acting training that would shape his approach to character. His early career consisted of small television roles and Broadway work, including a role in The Immoralist (1954) that earned him a Daniel Blum Theatre World Award and brought him to the attention of director Elia Kazan.
Kazan cast Dean in East of Eden (1955), his debut film performance, as Cal Trask — the bad son who tries and fails to earn his father's love. The performance earned Dean the first of two posthumous Academy Award nominations and established him as someone with a quality of emotional rawness and psychological authenticity that American cinema had not quite seen before. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) made him the generational icon: Jim Stark, the sensitive teenager tormented by his parents' inability to provide the stability he needs, expressed something about mid-1950s American youth experience that connected with an entire generation.
James Dean died on September 30, 1955, at age twenty-four, in a car accident near Cholame, California, when his Porsche 550 Spyder — known to friends as 'Little Bastard' — collided with an oncoming car turning left at an intersection. He had completed Rebel Without a Cause but not yet seen its release; Giant (1956) would be released posthumously. Only three completed film performances, and in two of them — East of Eden and Rebel — performances of such emotional intensity and technical sophistication that they would have established a major career had Dean lived. In death, he became the eternal young rebel, frozen at twenty-four, incapable of the compromises that aging requires.
