Actor. Born James Byron Dean, February 8, 1931, Marion, Indiana, died in 1955 in an auto crash. The son of a dental technician, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, California at age five, but after his mother's death, he returned to the Midwest at age nine and was raised by relatives on their Iowa farm. After graduating from high school, he returned to California, where he attended Santa Monica Junior College and UCLA. He began acting with James Whitmore's little theater group, appeared in occasional TV commercials, and played bit parts in several films. In 1951 he went to New York, where after hanging around the theater district earning his living as a busboy, he got a part in Broadway's "See the Jaguar". He later observed classes at the Actors Studio, played bits in TV dramas, and returned to Broadway in "The Immoralist" (1954). This last appearance resulted in a screen test at Warners and one of the most spectacularly brief careers of any screen star. In just more than a year, and in only three films, Dean became a widely admired screen personality, a personification of the restless American youth of the mid-50's, an embodiment of the title of one of his films, "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) and "Giant" (1956). Dean was killed in a highway crash while driving his Porsche to Salinas, to compete in a racing event. His adulation by fans grew posthumously to legendary proportions. Many of them refused to accept his death, and a James Dean cult developed into a mass mystique of a kind that surrounded the personality of no other star since Valentino. Numerous posthumous biographies of James Dean have been published. One of these, by former roommate James Bast, was turned into a TV movie, "James Dean" (1976) starring Stephen McHattie in the title role. There were also several compilation documentaries, including "The James Dean Story" (1957), directed by George W. George and Robert Altman. Echoes of the Dean adulation fill Altman's fiction feature "Come Back to the Five and Dime", "Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" (1982) and James Bridges' "September 30, 1955" (1978). The latter film's title represents the date of the star's death.
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