James Dean’s career was short, but legendary

He made three movies. He’s been famous forever after.

James Dean’s entire film career fits into 18 months — and he wasn’t even alive to see two-thirds of it released. But before any of that, there was a strange, almost eerie footnote.

Not long before his death, Dean showed off his brand-new Porsche 550 Spyder to his friend, the actor Alec Guinness, in a parking lot. Guinness, by his own account, took one look at the car and told him, flatly, that if he got in it, he’d be dead within a week. Dean laughed it off. He died in that car eight days later.

There are dozens upon dozens of James Dean stamps from around the world. This particular one is from Monteserrat, which was issued in 1995, featuring a scene from Giant, a movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. The tiny British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean issued a host of stamps from his movies, which you can see at the bottom of this page.

It’s the kind of story that sounds too neatly tragic to be true, and yet Guinness told it himself, more than once, for the rest of his life. True or embellished in the retelling, it’s become part of the mythology that grew up around Dean almost instantly — a career that ended so abruptly, it left room for legend to fill in everything the films themselves didn’t have time to say.

Anecdote confidence: Widely repeated, not independently verified — the Guinness premonition story comes from Guinness’s own memoir and later retellings. It’s a first-person account rather than something independently corroborated, so it carries the usual caution around a single source’s dramatic recollection.

Like a good Hollywood story? There’s a lot more about James Dean, and 49 others and the stamps that honor them all, in my upcoming book. Enter your email and I’ll let you know the minute Hollywood’s Legendary Stars hits the shelves. [Notify Me]