HOWZAT

The posters and iconic images of Dean tend to show him coolly in control — cocked leg, upturned collar, angled cigarette. But in his three films he spends most of the time fidgeting, or contorted with the pain of being misunderstood.

He was an instinctive talent, who probably suffered from dyslexia. He found Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio too critical, and shied away from classes, so he never really honed any technique. When he was cast as the eternal adolescent, all these tricks and ploys played into the character. When he had to play an old man at the end of Giant he looked amateurish. Robbed of his absurdly photogenic looks, his magic evaporates.

The director of Giant, George Stevens, didn’t indulge and nurture Dean the way Kazan and Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) had done. Stevens told him he was not a railroad lantern and must not wag his head, and he had to walk properly: “No hopscotch.” He wanted to curb all “Brandoisms”.

Dean was not ignorant of his emergent craft. He admitted he needed to “develop a style of my own”, and talked about travelling to Europe as the first step. But his array of junior Brandoisms were actually perfectly fitting for the embodiment of callow misery.

Newman’s acting in his Brando phase in the early 1950s is more crudely imitative and ineffective. He feels like a strong character playing confused or dumb. Dean really was a tortured soul trapped between boy and man.

Of the 28 James Dean biographies listed by Indiana University, the most inaccurate title is The Mutant King. If he was anything regal, Dean was a prince, and a neglected, illegitimate one at that.

THEY WANTED A BIT OF JIMMY

The Eagles’ James Dean

“You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye”.

Robbie Williams

re-created the iconic turtle neck shot as an ode to the actor but also to hide his pie chins. Probably.

Broadway, cigarette, black overcoat

It’s become a rite of passage for every band to pose as Dean in that picture.

James Dean Bradfield,

lead singer of Manic Street Preachers. His father wanted to name him Clint Eastwood Bradfield — a plan his mother, a Dean fan, successfully vetoed.

Morrissey’s Suedehead

The video for the song was filmed in Dean’s home town of Fairmount, Indiana, in 1988.

Diane Tell’s La légende de Jimmy

The French chanteuse is religious about Jim: “Et je me donnerai à toi/ Comme si tu étais lui” (“And I will give myself to you as though you were him”).

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean

The play by Ed Graczyk, about a meeting of the Disciples of JD, was turned into a flick by Robert Altman in 1982.

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