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A fallen American icon in the tradition of Elvis, Marilyn, and fewer than a handful of others, Dean's enormous cultural resonance exists in inverse proportion to his actual body of work. He had starring roles in only three films. His appeal combined a reticent ruggedness with an air of painful introspection; his outburst of "You're tearin' me apart!" in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was the closest he came to explicitly stating an emotional dilemma. How much of Dean's character was an expression of his "true self" as opposed to a creation of Method acting will never really be known, and to a certain extent it's the blurring of such boundaries that makes Dean such an enduring figure-fans from every generation can easily believe the actor was the thing he embodied.
Dean worked in theater and had a couple of movie bits (including one in Samuel Fuller's 1951 Korean war drama Fixed Bayonets before moving to New York where he did stage and TV work. A Broadway appearance in an adaptation of André Gide's "The Immoralist" attracted the attention of Hollywood producers; he tested for Warner Bros. and was subsequently cast as one of the rival brothers in Elia Kazan's 1955 film of John Steinbeck's novel, East of Eden His performance in that film created a sensation; without consciously trying, he became a symbol of the increasingly alienated youth of the post-WW2 era. His next role, as a confused teen in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause had an even more explicit appeal to young moviegoers. Dean had completed work on George Stevens' Giant (1956) when he was killed in a crash while speeding his Porsche Spider to Salinas, California, to participate in an auto race. His cult was such that Stevens received letters from Dean fans threatening to kill the director should he cut a single frame of Dean's performance. He received a posthumous Best Actor Oscar nomination for Giant just as he did the year before for East of Eden Dean's short life and career has been dissected and chronicled in a large number of books, documentaries, and reminiscences, and legions of fans still flock to his Indiana grave each year.
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