Do famous people who die before their time have a disproportionate impact on popular culture ?
This theory is certainly borne out by the resonance that James Dean has had in the decades since his death – 70 years ago – at the age of 24. “Live fast & Die young” might have been the actor’s dark motto, but his image & personal style retain their power in popular culture long after many of his Hollywood contemporaries have faded into obscurity. Of course, Dean was blessed with those looks :- the penetrating but vulnerable eyes, the quiff, the cigarette perched on the lower lip, & the crumpled, uncaring style of the working man he’d grown up being on an Indiana pig farm. It was all Levi’s jeans or khaki trousers, motorcycle boots, chambray shirts, & that heavy double breasted overcoat, made famous by the Stock photo of the actor walking hunched against the rain in New York (photo unavailable due to copyright isshooes) Now Dean wasn’t particularly well dressed in the conventional sense. He was no Sinatra, Errol Flynn or Miles Davis. But as much thanks to his on-screen costume as his off-screen style, his clothing became totemic of the new era of the teenager. Most famously, there’s the red blouson, left unzipped, worn over a white crew-necked T-shirt (which just a few years previously had been strictly military issue). Then there’s the utterly conventional V-neck wool sweater worn over an open collared shirt. Dean didn’t just dress cool, he was cool.
“If a man can bridge the gap between life & death, if he can live on after he’s dead, then maybe he was a great man”. Prophetic words, but Dean never got to prove as much. By the day he died, he’d racked up several prestigious acting awards & received two Oscar nominations (for East of Eden & Rebel Without a Cause) both released in 1955. He’d also built on & popularised Brando’s method acting style, & – maybe his most lasting legacy – provided a blueprint for a new idea of defiant youthful individualism, which rubbed up against the collective spirit of the war generation, who by then were in the mid to late 30’s & therefore officially old. This was the man (& motor-racing enthusiast) who died when his Porche Spyder – which he’d nicknamed “Little Bastard” – collided with another vehicle just a few hours after he’d received a speeding ticket, & a few weeks after he’d filmed a public service announcement about how excessive speed on the highway can be more dangerous than on a racing track. The line he ad-libbed ? “The life you save might be mine”……….
Indeed, he dressed as he lived, devil-may-care & representing, as his friend actor Martin Landau would put it, “something that was happening in the United States…….Until that moment in time, grown ups set the style for everything”. After that time, the likes of Dean did. He was the progenitor of the coming youthquake, on his death passed the baton internationally to the likes of Elvis, Hallyday, & Buchholz.
Would any of this have happened if Dean had been alive when Giant was released, posthumously, in 1956, prompting another Oscar nod – his third in a row – even if the rest of the cast, Rock Hudson & Elizabeth Taylor among them – seem to be “split between awe of his talent & disgust over his indulgence” according to Hollywood insiders ? Would the tragic star quality that people recognised in Dean right from the moment he died have been as potent if he’d lived to be the old man of Hollywood ? Would the mythology of his taciturn cool have survived to be, as it has been, repeatedly co-opted by fashion & advertising in order to connote the charisma that these days seems to be in such short supply ?
We can’t know. But when asked about the prospect, Dean suggested that to die in a racing car crash might be preferable to finding out. It would, he said,be “Fast & clean & you go out in a blaze of glory”. Many years on, that blaze still burns so very brightly.
© DJM 2025
