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James Brown Dean was born on February 8th 1931 in Marion, Indiana, in one of the most depressed States of the US, in that period.
When he was still 9, his mother Mildred died for cancer in 1940 and his relationship with his father, Winton Dean become more and more difficult.

Some years before, his family had moved with him in Santa Monica, California where his father had started an activity as dental technician but, after his mother's death, James went with his father to live with some relatives of them in Fairmount, Indiana, where he continued his studied, also with good results in basketball and recitation, while his relations with his father worsened.

Luckily for him, he was grown up with love by his uncle and soon he begun to be more and more interested by cinema and theatre.
He developed a restless, eccentric and ambitious personality, full of unresolved conflicts, mainly due to the bad terms with his father who couldn't be a reference point for him as it would be for all sons.

James, after graduating from Fairmount High School in May 1949, moved back in California to obtain a degree in pre-law at Santa Monica College.
At that point, he started his studies at the University, at the UCLA, but he was more and more intentioned to become an actor and he was more and more appreciated for his performances at the theatre.
So, he changed his study course to attend that of Drama, but his father refused to pay the acting school, thinking this would have produced nothing good.
This caused a string contrast with his father, until James abandoned the UCLA (1951), to pursue the career as an actor and he started to make precarious works to gain the necessary money.

Since October 1951, following the actor James Whitmore and the advice of the radio director Rogers Brackett, who offered him help for his career, James moved in New York, where he appeared in various episodes of many CBS series.
Eventually, in 1952, he was admitted to play and study at the prestigious "Actors Studio", in New York.

At 23, in 1955, the film director Elia Kazan chose him as protagonist in his film "East of Eden" from the homonym romance by John Steinbeck.
He was preferred to other young rebel actors, already very famous, like Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift who, in the Kazan's opinion, didn't have the same emotional charge, the same hate for the father's figure, the same rage and deep unhappiness that featured James Dean.

In that period, after the great and innovative Italian movies of Neo-Realism,

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