When I was in high school, my best friend and I liked to play a game called Favorite Dead Husbands. Both of us were out as bi, but it became an ongoing joke to talk about our favorite dearly departed famous men we deeply admired that we’d marry if we had the chance. Though I know we talked about many, I can only remember two of them. One of them was William Shakespeare (who I think was more my crush than hers). But the other one was an actor we agreed to share: the fiendishly handsome, eternally cool, and powerfully raw actor, James Dean. It wasn’t until years later I found out that he (and Shakespeare) were both bi.
Born February 8, 1931, to Winton and Mildred as their only child, James Byron Dean experienced a rough childhood. Father Winton uprooted his family to Santa Monica, CA, when James was five. However, at the age of 9, his mother Mildred died from uterine cancer, and young James was sent back to Indiana to be raised by his uncle and aunt on a farm while his father quickly remarried.
Dean moved back to Santa Monica after high school and first studied pre-law at Santa Monica City College. However, after not doing well in those classes, he soon found his innate talent in acting classes and dropped out of school, eager to get going in this newfound career. After a few fledgling acting jobs and working as a parking valet to get by, Dean was accepted into the Actors Studio in New York in 1951 and studied Method acting under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg.
After a few small but impressive roles in some Broadway plays, Hollywood came calling, and Dean’s career began to pick up. Director Elia Kazan was looking for “a Brando” for one of the leads in a film adaptation of the John Steinbeck nove East of Eden and cast Dean in the part. While his technique of often improvising the lines and changing up his characterization often frazzled the other actors in the cast, it ultimately led to an emotional, star-making performance. Eden ultimately led to the first of his two posthumous nominations for Best Actor — the only actor to this day to have done so.
As far as his bisexuality, Dean was notably with a whole passel of lovers of different genders. Dean had relationships with actresses like Liz Sheridan (AKA Jerry’s mom from Seinfeld), Barbara Glenn, Ursula Andress, and Beverly Wills. Perhaps his best-known romance was with Italian actress and model Pier Angeli, which purportedly ended sourly when she dropped that she was engaged to another man. Dean allegedly revved his car outside the church during their wedding ceremony in protest. His liaisons with noted men include a long, tortured relationship with Marlon Brando (#Bi2), radio director and ad exec Rogers Brackett, writer (and his first biographer) William Bast, and director Bob Stevens.
Dean only filmed two other roles before his young, untimely death, but they ended up being iconic pictures. The first immortalized him as emotionally frustrated teen Jim Stark in 1955’s Rebel Without A Cause, also starring Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo (#OneOfUs). Both his performance and his looks were seared into the collective memory of a young generation, with Dean’s swagger, dangling cigarette, and denim jeans becoming part of his immortal profile (in fact, Dean is often credited with popularizing denim jeans as part of the American sartorial silhouette). Concerned that he would be pigeonholed as an agonized youth by his previous two roles, Dean’s final credit was as ranch-hand-cum-millionaire in the oil epic Giant, which saw his character, Jet, age decades throughout the story. This performance nabbed Dean his second posthumous Oscar nomination for acting. Neither of these films were released before Dean’s death, but both were selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry for their cultural significance.
Dean developed a taste for motorsport racing, which ultimately led to his doom. After participating in some amateur races, during the summer of 1955, he purchased a Porsche 550 Spyder and was en route to Salinas to enter a weekend race. Accompanying him was stunt coordinator Bill Hickman, photographer Sanford Roth, and mechanic Rolf Wütherich. After getting a speeding ticket, two hours later, Dean was in a head-on collision at an intersection and died almost instantaneously from his injuries.
News of his death spread quickly across news wires, and the abrupt end of his life and career made international headlines. His legacy was cemented with the release of his two final films, etching him as a permanent fixture of cool, angst, and emotional power in the American psyche. His life has been the subject of multiple songs, television movies, and Broadway plays in some shape or form. His unique delivery and performance inspired some of the biggest film actors of the twentieth century, including but not limited to: Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen, Nicolas Cage, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
James Dean was a dynamic and undeniable influence on pop culture, film acting, and artistic expression. And he was bi.
Though Dean’s life was tragically short, there is no way a simple article like this one could cover the entire trajectory of such a singular life. If you would like to learn more, I highly encourage looking at reputable sources online or picking up one of many biographies of the actor at your local library. Do so, and you’ll soon see why Teenaged Jennie added him to my list of Favorite Dead Husbands.
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