On September 30, 1955, James Dean was driving a Porsche 550 Spyder east on US Route 466 near Cholame, California, on his way to a race meeting at Salinas, when a Ford Tudor driven by a student named Donald Turnupseed turned across his path at a junction and the two cars met almost head-on. Dean was 24. He was dead on arrival at the hospital in Paso Robles. Turnupseed survived with minor injuries. The mechanic riding with Dean, Rolf Wutherich, was thrown clear and lived.
He had been filming Giant, and he had finished it. East of Eden had come out in March and made him a star, Rebel Without a Cause was released a month after his death, and Giant in 1956. Three films in a year, two of them released after he was gone, which is most of the reason the idea of James Dean is fixed in the shape it has: the work and the death happened at the same moment, and neither has been separated from the other since.
The appeal was not technique, at least not at first. Dean had come from a small town in Indiana, a Methodist upbringing, and a mother who died when he was nine, and he had gone to New York, worked in live television, and been taken up by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. He played sons who were not understood and who were angry about it, and he was not pretending: the stiffness, the mumble and the refusal to look anyone in the eye came from him, and audiences read it as honesty rather than acting.
He had been stopped for speeding hours before the crash and given a ticket on the way. He had been told not to race that weekend. He went anyway, towing the Spyder behind a station wagon with Wutherich in it, and the car was new, with a few hundred miles on it and a reputation for being quick and difficult. The coroner ruled the collision an accident and no charges were brought.
The films did the rest. Rebel Without a Cause became the defining American picture about teenage alienation, and Dean was nominated posthumously for Best Actor for East of Eden in 1956, and again for Giant, the first posthumous acting nominations in the Academy's history. He has been voted among the greatest screen actors in every poll since, and the legend has outlasted almost everyone who was working when he died.