Eartha Kitt & James Dean, early 1950s (via PBS/American Masters). Dean studied dance with Kitt and said he learned more about acting from her lessons than he had in any acting class.

“[James Dean] said to me, ‘I want to move like you, can you teach me how to move my body like you do on stage?’ And I told him where to meet me, here in New York and that’s where we met for dance classes. And that’s where Jamie and I always met downstairs from that studio to have coffee, to have our little tete-a-tete conversations.”

“He was like my brother. He had something in him that he didn’t understand. He wanted to learn from me how to move on the stage the way I do, so I taught him how to control his body and how to let the words physically carry you from this point to that point. I was in a play and he’d just done his first film so we were both becoming known at that time. It was a good time.”

-Eartha Kitt

James Dean, age 18 (via James Dean by M. Perry via, most likely, that aunt who likes to proudly show off one’s most embarrassing pictures)

“It is sad for any moviegoer to have no great star burning during his or her most impressionable years. Many stars, no matter how well they survive passing time, are only eminent because of the way they first mark consciousness. Once penetrated, we never forget the scar.

And knowing what Dean meant in 1955 and 1956 makes it possible to understand how Valentino once moved viewers to the quick.”

-excerpted from David Thomson’s essay on James Dean (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film)

James Dean photographed at his former high school in Fairmount, Indiana (1955) Photographer: Dennis Stock

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James Dean during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause (1955, dir. Nicholas Ray) Photographer: Dennis Stock (via)

James Dean during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause, inside the planetarium (1955) Photographer: Dennis Stock 

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