James Dean Still Fascinates 50 Years After Death

Sept. 25, 2005 — -- James Dean did not invent adolescent angst, but he certainly perfected it.

"You're tearing me apart!" Dean said in "Rebel Without a Cause." "You, you say one thing, you say another, and everything changes back again!"

In just three films -- "Rebel Without a Cause," "East of Eden" and "Giant" -- over the course of one year, Dean gave voice to the outsiders, the misfits, and those who have a problem with authority.

When he died at age 24, he became an instant icon.

"He epitomized that dissatisfied young teenager. He looked like the boy next door, but he behaved differently," said actor Martin Landau, who was friends with Dean.

What audiences didn't know was this vulnerable complexity came out of a difficult Indiana childhood.

"His mother died when he was a little kid, his father didn't understand him, and he was raised by an aunt and uncle and a grandfather on a farm," said Landau. "He had a lot of darkness, without question."

Photographer Dennis Stock, who took some of the most lasting images of his friend Dean that are now out in the book "James Dean: 50 Years Ago," said he "felt sorry for him often."

"There was a pain in him," Stock said. "And it wasn't that removed from what we saw on-screen."

Dean honed his craft onstage, and did a number of live television dramas. But it was his 1954 role in "East of Eden" that shot him to stardom.

"You never gave any of us an inch, ever, for what you thought was right," said Dean in one of the famous lines from that movie.

He did two more movies, and with the paychecks Dean bought sports cars and took up racing.

"He drove fast, but no faster than anybody else that I knew at the time," Landau said. "A lot of people said he had a death wish. He did not."

In September 1955, Dean shot a public service announcement to encourage safe driving.

Two weeks later, while driving to a racetrack in California, he collided head-on with another car.

Dean never lived to see the premieres of "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant." But those performances keep him frozen in time -- forever young and always cool.

The firm that manages his estate generates millions of dollars a year by licensing his image. Scores of books and documentaries have examined his short life. And tens of thousands of visitors a year flock to his childhood home in Fairmont, Ind., where they check out the nearby museum dedicated to him and pay their respects at his grave.

Fifty years later, people are still enthralled with the tragic romance of a fallen idol.