James Dean

Marlon Brando is often thought to have been a great influence on James Dean. Dean was not only accused of copying his acting style, but also his rebel lifestyle. However, according to William Russo, "The first James Dean was not Marlon Brando, though it was a popular myth. The Dean persona had always been adolescent in age or psychology." Brando's first film "was about adult military veterans, hardly the subject of teenage angst and conflict."

Dean began his professional acting career with a Pepsi Cola television commercial, followed by a stint as a stunt tester for the Beat the Clock game show. He quit college to focus on his budding career, but struggled to get jobs in Hollywood and paid his bills only by working as a parking lot attendant at CBS Studios.

At that time, Dean "exchanged sexual favors for a place to live" and for "Hollywood contacts." Interviews with his friend Barbara Glenn and then aspiring actress, Arlene Sachs, who told Dean she loved him, "reveal that Dean's relationships included many brief homosexual encounters." In his biography, "The James Dean Story," literary critic Ron Martinetti deals only with one of these "homosexual relationships", namely, that in his early days in Hollywood and New York City with Rogers Brackett, a radio director for an advertising agency whom Dean met in the summer of 1951 while working as a parking attendant at CBS. However, according to Leigh W. Rutledge, "Dean bragged to a friend that he'd performed homosexual acts with 'five of the big names in Hollywood.' He also claimed to have worked, with his friend Nick Adams, as a street hustler after he first arrived in Hollywood."

He actually had very small parts in several films before achieving stardom. The first film in which he spoke was Sailor Beware, where he played a boxing trainer. The Paramount comedy starred Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Following actor James Whitmore's advice, Dean moved to New York City to pursue live stage acting, where he was accepted to study under Lee Strasberg in the storied Actors Studio. Dean was very proud of being a member of the Actors Studio. In 1952, in a letter to his family, he called it "The greatest school of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock. ... Very few get into it ... It is the best thing that can happen to an actor. I am one of the youngest to belong." His career picked up and he did several episodes on early-1950s TV shows such as Kraft Television Theater, Studio One, Lux Video Theatre, Robert Montgomery Presents, Danger and General Electric Theater. One early role, for the CBS series, Omnibus, (Glory in the Flower) saw Dean portraying the same type of disaffected youth he would later immortalize in Rebel Without a Cause (this summer, 1953 program was also notable for featuring the song "Crazy Man, Crazy", one of the first dramatic TV programs to feature rock and roll music). Positive reviews for his role in André Gide's The Immoralist led to calls from Hollywood and paved the way to film success. In 1954, he returned to Broadway in The Immoralist.