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Blonde Rebellion
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I post things but you won't like them. Let's kill them... with kindness.
When director Gary Legon found this screen test of James Dean and Joanne Woodward (for East of Eden), he knew he wanted to use it in his documentary, The Real James Dean. However he felt the need to ask Woodward’s permission first, since is was a rather “sexy scene” and she was, of course, married to Paul Newman, and they had children and such… Legon wasn’t sure if maybe this screen test would be embarrassing for her. So he wrote to Woodward about it, and she quickly wrote back, “Of course you can use this! This will be proof, finally, to my daughters, that I indeed had this incredible kiss with the late, great, James Dean!”
“Elizabeth went off mysteriously with Jimmy each evening, and none of us could figure out where they went. They would arrive for dinner together. She would sit in the balcony next to him during rushes and then they would slip away for what seemed like most of the night.”
For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by thick eyebrows. They add character and warmth to a face. To ever-so-slightly paraphrase Jack Black, “you must never underestimate the power of the eyebrows.”
edit2* frida kahlo william powell jennifer jones tyrone power Ingrid Bergman Gregory Peck Lauren Bacall montgomery clift audrey hepburn anthony perkins elizabeth taylor james dean natalie wood Louis de Funes jackie kennedy jbko jack nicholson Edie Sedgwick sean connery brooke shields martin scorsese madonna george clooney Jennifer Connelly daniel day lewis Rachel Weisz joaquin phoenix keira knightley christian bale 
Once I remarked to him, “You never talk about anyone.” His reply was startling: “The unspoken word we control. Once spoken, it controls us.” Such a profound statement impressed me. - Don Martin
Icons | Ian Berry.
Portraits Made of Used Blue Jeans.
Marlon Brando on his experience with James Dean, from his autobiography “Songs My Mother Taught Me”:
After we met on the set of East of Eden, Jimmy began calling for advice or to suggest a night out. We talked on the phone and ran into each other at parties, but never became close. I think he regarded me as a kind of older brother or mentor, and I suppose responded to him as if I was. I felt a kinship for him and was sorry for him. He was hypersensitive, and I could see in his eyes and in the way he moved and spoke that he had suffered a lot. He was tortured by insecurities, the origin of which I never determined, though he said he’d had a difficult childhood and a lot of problems with his father. I urged him to seek assistance, perhaps go into therapy. I have no idea whether he ever did, but I did know it can be hard for a troubled kid like him to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn, and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake. Once he showed up at a party and I saw him take off his jacket, roll it into a ball and throw it onto the floor. It struck me that he was imitating something I had done and I took him aside and said, “Don’t do that, Jimmy. Just hang your coat up like everybody else. You don’t have to throw your coat in the corner. It’s much easier to hang it up than pick it up off the floor.”
Another time, I told him I thought he was foolish to try to copy me as an actor. “Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am. You mustn’t try to copy me. Emulate the best aspects of yourself.” I said it was a dead-end street to try to be somebody else. In retrospect, I realize it’s not unusual for people to borrow some else’s form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy did. He was still developing when I first met him, but by the time he made Giant, he was no longer trying to imitate me. He still had his insecurities, but he had become his own man. He was awfully good in that last picture, and people identified with his pain and made him a cult hero. We can only guess what kind of actor he would have become in another twenty years. I think he could have become a great one. Instead he died and was forever entombed in his myth.
James Dean was the perfect embodiment of an eternal struggle. It might be innocence struggling with experience, youth with age, or man with his image. But in every aspect his struggle was a mirror to a generation of rebels without a cause.
Andy Warhol
james dean 
Dean barely spoke to Natalie that morning, but trailed her out the door during the lunch break, inviting her on his motorcycle. “I was thrilled. We went speeding off to some greasy spoon.” When Dean turned on a portable radio, Natalie expected to hear bongo drums. Instead, “he played beautiful classical music.” Dean chatted with Natalie about the script at lunch, relaxing her. Suddenly, he put down his sandwich. “I know you,” he said challengingly. “You’re a child actor.” Natalie, who sensed he was testing her, responded, “That’s true. But it’s better than acting like a child.” Dean “didn’t get it for a moment,” she later recalled. “Then he started to laugh. Then I started to laugh, and that’s how our wonderful friendship began.”
-Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad
“Tonight, I even tried to buy your love, but now I don’t want it any more… I can’t use it any more. I don’t want any kind of love any more.” ~Cal Trask
“If Marlon Brando changed the way people acted, then James Dean changed the way people lived” ~Martin Sheen
james dean 
