James Dean height - How tall is James Dean?

His favorite book was "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. James Franco - who played Dean in the biopic James Dean (2001), voiced The Fox in the animated film adaptation of the book, The Little Prince (2015).

In October 1997, he was ranked #33 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list.

He was pictured on a 32¢ US commemorative postage stamp in the Legends of Hollywood series, originally issued on Monday, June 24, 1996.

He was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#42) (1995).

Marlon Brando, in his 1994 autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me", says that Dean, who idolized him, based his acting on him and his lifestyle on what he thought Brando's lifestyle was.

Elia Kazan, in his 1988 autobiography "A Life", says that during the production of East of Eden (1955), he had to have Dean move into a bungalow near his on the Warner Brothers lot to keep an eye on him, so wild was his nightlife.

He is one of several famous and tragic figures from history to be featured on the sleeve artwork of the album "Clutching at Straws" by rock band Marillion (released in 1987).

According to "The Mutant King", David Dalton's 1974 biography of James Dean, the rumor that Dean was a masochist who liked to have cigarettes stubbed out on his naked body can be traced to a pencil sketch of his called "The Human Ashtray". The sketch featured a human body, in the guise of an ashtray, with many cigarette stubs in it. Dalton speculates that the sketch has nothing to do with Dean's sexual proclivities but much to do with the fact that he was a heavy smoker.

During the filming of Giant (1956), he and Rock Hudson did not get along. This tension heightened their onscreen clashes. However, according to Hudson's ex-wife Phyllis Gates, he cried after hearing the news of Dean's untimely death. Gates wrote, "Rock couldn't be reached. He was overcome by guilt and shame, almost as though he himself had killed James Dean.".

In the Elia Kazan production of John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955) he played Cal Trask, the bad brother who could not force affection from his stiff-necked father.

His true starring role, the one which fixed his image forever in American culture, was that of the brooding red-jacketed teenager Jim Stark in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Imitating Marlon Brando, he also bought a Triumph motorcycle. Instead of Brando's 650cc 6T Thunderbird model, which he used in the film The Wild One (1953), he bought the smaller 500cc TR5 Trophy model. This Triumph featured in a famous series of photographs by Phil Stern, the motorcycle itself being recovered, restored and currently displayed at the "James Dean Museum" in Fairmount, Indiana.

His early film efforts were strictly small roles: a sailor in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis overly frantic musical comedy Sailor Beware (1952); a GI in Samuel Fuller's moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets! (1951) and a youth in the Piper Laurie-Rock Hudson comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952). He had major roles in only three movies.

He also worked as a "stunt tester" on the game show Beat the Clock (1950), testing the safety of the stunts that some of the studio audience members would later perform. However, he proved so agile at completing the stunts that his results could not be used to set time limits for contestants to complete them. So he was reluctantly released.

James Byron Dean was born February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana, to Mildred Marie (Wilson) and Winton A. Dean, a farmer turned dental technician. His mother died when Dean was nine, and he was subsequently raised on a farm by his aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Indiana. After grade school, he moved to New York to pursue his dream of acting. He received rave reviews for his work as the blackmailing Arab boy in the New York production of Gide's "The Immoralist", good enough to earn him a trip to Hollywood.

He was voted the 30th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Premiere magazine.

He was voted the 22nd Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly.