70 years after his death, the legacy of James Dean lives on

Seventy years ago today, actor James Dean was killed while driving his sports car on a remote highway in Central California.

Dean had made only three films but was already a star whose brooding performances captured a counternarrative to the 1950s. His death at age 24 helped make him a legend.

Carroll Baker, who co-starred with Dean in his last movie, “Giant,” recalled how the cast learned of his death. She was in a projection room at the Warner Bros. lot with other cast members when director George Stevens “stood up and all the light drained out of him,” Baker told The Times in 1996. “Then he collected himself and said, ‘Jimmy Dean has just been killed.’”

Here is more from the pages of The Times.

The obituary

Here is how The Times reported on his death on Oct. 1, 1955:

James Dean, 24, one of Hollywood’s brightest new motion-picture stars, was killed early last night in a head-on collision at the rural town of Cholame, about 19 miles east of Paso Robles, the California Highway Patrol reported.

The young actor met death in his German-built Porsche sports car while en route to road races at Salinas. Patrolmen said Dean was dead on arrival at the Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital following the crash at the intersection of State Highway 41 and U.S. 466.

His mechanic, identified by the CHP as Rolph Wuetherich, about 27, of Hollywood, suffered a fractured jaw, fractured hip and body lacerations. He was described as in “moderately serious condition.”

The CHP office at San Luis Obispo said a car driven by Donald Turnupseed of Tulare made a left turn on Highway 41 while traveling east, colliding almost head on with Dean’s tiny sports car. Investigators said Turnupseed suffered minor injuries.

An attending physician was quoted as saying Dean died instantly at about 5:30 p.m. from a broken neck, numerous broken bones and severe lacerations over the entire body.

James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

(Warner Bros.)

Memorials

• Last year, Times reporter Hailey Branson Potts went to Dean’s last stop before his death and found that the actor still looms large even though memories are fading:

The handsome young man stares out at Highway 46: jacket collar popped, hair slicked back, blue eyes and parted lips frozen in a come-hither stare.

He points to a sign for a gas station — and the East of Eden Fudge Factory.

He’s the late actor James Dean. Or, rather, an enormous wooden cutout of him. The gas station, Blackwell’s Corner, is where the 24-year-old star of “Rebel Without a Cause” made his final stop before dying in a car crash in 1955.

It was such hallowed ground for movie buffs, even after the original building burned long ago, that fans were repeatedly caught trying to steal pieces of the old foundation.

But 68 years have passed. Memories are fading. People still ask the cashiers about Jimmy Dean — just not quite as much as they used to.

Sitting on a lawn under a shade tree, 87-year-old Ron Nelson graciously obliged when asked by yet another stranger for his recollection of that day.

The retired California Highway Patrol officer said he and his partner were just coming off a coffee break in Paso Robles when they got the call. When he arrived, he saw Dean being loaded into an ambulance and breathing heavily — a sign, he thought, of severe brain injury.

A big man in a Hawaiian shirt and a Panama hat, Nelson said he gets calls from all over the world when Sept. 30 rolls around. Reporters, biographers and avid fans all want his opinion.

“Strange thing is, I had never heard of James Dean the actor before the accident,” he said. “I thought maybe this was Jimmy Dean, the country singer.”

“Driving away from Jack Cafe we passed another, smaller monument to James Dean, across from the site of the crash that took his life. I watched in the rear-view mirror as it disappeared behind us, lost in the distance and lost in time, but forever new in the grieving hearts of those who remember.”

Elizabeth Taylor takes a nap next to James Dean.

(Richard C. Miller / Donaldson Collection / Getty Images)

Legacy

• Discussing Dean’s death in 2005, Times critic Kenneth Turan said the accident “catapulted Dean into a level of “live fast, die young” fame so extraordinary — including an unprecedented and unequaled two posthumous Oscar nominations — even the ambitious actor himself could not have imagined it … Dean’s young age and his good looks, his acting ability and what he was most skilled at, all combined with the cataclysmic way he died to cause an uproar that has yet to quiet down.”

He continued:

That astonishing cusp-of-stardom death at a young age aside, why has Dean attracted and held all this attention? What are the factors that have enabled him to live for so long, as the fan magazines would have it, beyond the grave?

It starts with the basics, including a name as clean and uncluttered as his profile, and Dean’s timeless, almost androgynous good looks. And not just in the movies.

For while other actors were as photogenic on screen as Dean, including “Giant” costar Elizabeth Taylor, it’s difficult to think of another star who made such an impact with his still images. Dean was not only photographed almost endlessly, he looks remarkable in just about every shot. And that was no accident.

While other stars might dislike being photographed off the set, Dean, preternaturally sophisticated about creating an image, reveled in it.