Monday Minute
No. 167 | September 27, 2010

Late for the Show

It’s an honor just to be nominated, as the saying goes, and some actors wait all their lives for that honor to come.  It’s no doubt a sweet moment to hear the news that the Motion Picture Academy has chosen your work to be among the year’s very best.

For many, including some of the best, the call never comes.  For a rare few, it comes too late.  A handful of times the Academy has nominated actors for Oscars, or presented them awards, after their death.  We’ll look at five of them this week.

Our theme this week
Actors with posthumous nominations for Oscars

James Dean (1931-1955):  East of Eden, Giant

James Dean was a guy who changed everything.  Not single-handedly, of course, but he was part of a small group that did.

In the history of film acting, there have been a few key developments:  the introduction of a naturalistic style, under D.W. Griffith et al. in the early days of silents, the transition to sound in the late 1920s, and method acting, which first became popular in the decade after the war.  Method actors of the ’50s are the dividing line between everything that was before and everything that has been since.

Dean was younger than others in that influential first generation of method actors (Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe), but in his short career he was one of its biggest stars.  His iconic status as a film actor rests on just three performances.  For director Elia Kazan, he played Cal Trask, the troubled twin brother in the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  Dean famously diverged from the script, improvising some scenes, and won great acclaim for the role.  Also in 1955, he starred as Jim Stark, (once again) a troubled teenager, in Rebel Without a Cause.  There was nothing like it before.  “You’re tearing me apart!” was a primal scream for a new generation.  It was a defining role and a defining film, and the age of teenage rebellion was born.  His next and last film was Giant, costarring with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.  Dean played Jett Rink, the guy who strikes oil, makes it big, and eventually pays the price for it.  (More on Giant here.)

Dean is best known for his films, but his list of acting credits is considerably longer than those three roles.  Dean performed in dozens of productions for television (for Studio One, Omnibus, Kraft Television Theater, et al.), and he did some notable stage work on and off Broadway.

On September 30, 1955, Dean died in a car accident in central California.  It was a few months after the release of East of Eden, for which he was later nominated for Best Actor, and a few weeks before Rebel Without a Cause. For 1956, he was again nominated for Best Actor, for Giant.

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East of Eden (1955)
Elia Kazan, director
John Steinbeck (novel), Paul Osborn (screenplay); writers
Ted McCord, director of photography
James Dean

 

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Giant (1956)
George Stevens, director
Edna Ferber (novel), Fred Guiol, Ivan Moffatt (screenplay),writers
William C. Mellor, cinematography
James Dean

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Quote of note
“Man has a choice and it’s a choice that makes him a man.”
—Cal Trask (James Dean), East of Eden (1955)

…58…59…60.