The late Hollywood icon James Dean would have turned 94 on Saturday, February 8, if his life had not been cut tragically short.
Dean became an icon of 1950s teenage rebellion for his electric-yet-sensitive portrayal of troubled youth Jim Stark in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, which was nominated for the Best Motion Picture Story Oscar the following year (but lost to Love Me or Leave Me). The actor only appeared in eight movies before his tragic death at age 24 in 1955, after his Porsche 550 Spyder was involved in a head-on collision near Cholame, California. Dean’s layered and often poignant acting in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden continues to inspire stars from later generations, with the two aforementioned movies, along with 1956’s posthumously released Giant, being inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
As we celebrate Dean on this milestone date, keep scrolling to see the legendary actors who he continues to inspire nearly a century after his birth.
Leonardo DiCaprio
The Titanic star told Deadline in 2016 that he felt “incredibly moved by Jimmy Dean” in East of Eden, the World War I drama in which Dean played disaffected teenager Caleb Trask.
“There was something so raw and powerful about that performance. His vulnerability … his confusion about his entire history, his identity, his desperation to be loved. That performance just broke my heart,” DiCaprio said.
DiCaprio was attached to play Dean in a biopic from Heat director Michael Mann in the 1990s, but the project never got off the ground.
“We saw clips of Giant, and then [Mann] put me in the back of the car with that cowboy hat,” he confirmed in 2016. “But I was a very young-looking kid, even when I was young. He decided to wait a couple of years, but I … looked really young.”
Johnny Depp
Depp has often credited his discovery of Dean as a “catalyst” for giving up his music career to become an actor. He became fascinated with the late teen idol after being given a copy of the Dean biography The Mutant King by a bandmate in the 1980s.
“While reading the book, I watched Rebel Without A Cause, and I thought ‘Wow, this guy really has something,’ and I was hooked,” Depp said in a 2005 BBC Radio 2 documentary.
The future Edward Scissorhands star discovered that Dean was an adopter of method acting, where he used a set of physical and sociological techniques developed by Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavski and popularized by teachers Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner in the United States.
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“I wasn’t really into acting at the time but as I was reading the Dean book,. I also picked up on An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski and became fascinated by the whole concept of ‘the method,’” Depp said. “When I read that Dean was also from the ‘method’ school, it all sort of came together for me. So that was a really important period for me, about three or four years before I decided to become an actor – and James Dean was the catalyst.”
Robert Pattinson
The Batman actor starred in the 2015 biopic Life, where he played Dean’s best friend Dennis Stock opposite Dane DeHaan as the Giant star.
Pattinson touched on his personal feelings about Dean while promoting Life at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, where he mentioned feeling a kinship with the screen legend early in his career.
“I think a lot of [young] actors have their, sort of, James Dean phase where every audition, no matter what the part is, they come in and do a James Dean impression. I definitely had one of those,” he joked. “He’s definitely iconic.”
The Twilight star later confessed to The Guardian that he never lobbied to play Dean in Life because he “wouldn’t even know where to begin” to prepare for the role. Pattinson said he recognized there were similarities in the way both actors avoided intrusive press coverage.
“[When] the first Twilight came out, I’d definitely say dumb stuff just so I wouldn’t sound cookie-cutter or part of the machine, ” Pattinson admitted.
Dane DeHaan
Pattinson’s Life costar confirmed at the time of the biopic’s release that Dean had “always been a role model” for him. DeHaan played Dean near the end of his life in the 2015 drama, as he traveled throughout the United States with his photographer pal Dennis Stock (Pattinson).
“[Dean] has always been one of my favorite actors, so when I was in acting school, I would watch his movies. He was amazing,” DeHaan said in an interview with Telerama when Life was released. “That’s what he always was to me, an acting inspiration.”
DeHaan pointed to East of Eden as his favorite Dean performance, but acknowledged that Rebel Without a Cause and Giant were also important influences on his style of acting. He worked with both a dialect coach and a makeup artist in building his Life performance, in addition to wearing a wig and fake earlobes in order to match Dean’s physicality.
“The physicality of [the performance] comes most from trying to understand who he was as a person,” DeHaan explained. “If I have a strong and specific internal life, I think the physicality follows.”
Robert De Niro
Two-time Oscar winner De Niro singled out Dean, along with Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, in a 2015 interview with Cigar Aficionado as three actors he was “affected by” while growing up.
The Taxi Driver star even studied ‘the method’ at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, where Dean had honed his craft in the early 1950s.
In a 1994 interview, De Niro suggested Dean’s performances were particularly spellbinding for young actors because they seemed entirely unmatched by anyone else.
“When you saw James Dean do East of Eden, he was great, but you can’t do what he could do,” De Niro argued.
Nicolas Cage
Like Depp, Cage has frequently cited Dean as a crucial early influence in helping him decide to pursue acting. Cage comes from a distinguished Hollywood family – the Coppolas – but told 60 Minutes that Dean’s work inspired him most of all.
“It was about wanting to be James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and wearing that red jacket,” Cage said of his teenage ambitions.
During a talk at SXSW in 2014, Cage singled out Dean’s performance in East of Eden as particularly meaningful for him.
“I started acting because I wanted to be James Dean. I saw him in Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden,” Cage reiterated. “Nothing affected me – no rock song, no classical music – the way Dean affected me in Eden. It blew my mind. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
Martin Sheen
The three-time Emmy-winning West Wing actor was the keynote speaker at the James Dean 50th Anniversary Year Global Media Event in 2007, where he suggested the Giant star “transcended” the art of acting.
“[In 1955], I went to see a movie called East of Eden, and I didn’t realize that he had already been killed,” Sheen remembered. “I was profoundly affected by his performance and have been, ever since. … All three of his films had a profound effect on my life, on my work and on my generation.”
Sheen shared his belief that the “core of [Dean’s] influence” was that “it was no longer acting, it was behavior” in his projects.
“[His acting] was deeply, deeply personal. That’s what appealed to me, and everyone who was influenced by him,” Sheen added. “[He had] this deeply, deeply personal involvement in what he was doing and it led us to … truly understand[ing] that if it is not personal, it’s impersonal and if it’s impersonal, nobody really cares.”
