I decided i would do a post of actors who have died young, who were growing up to be fantastic actors, i decided to focus on 2 great ones, James Dean and River Phoenix.
River Phoenix:
River Phoenix was a fantastic actor and person, to me at least. River Jude Phoenix was born in a samll town of Madras, Oregon and travelled quite a lot with his family, though in the late 70s his family settled in Florida and then in California.
River started acting professionally when he was 10 where him and his sister Rain did audience warm up for the television show Real Kids, eventually agents noticed him and he was set up to do commerecials gradually leading to TV movies and a recurring role in the television series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
River has been in such films as:
Joe Dante’s Explorers
Rob Reiners Stand By Me, He co-starred with Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast and also portrayed Indy (Harrison Ford) as a young boy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Additional credits include I Love you to Death and Dogfight.
River was named Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his starring role as a narcoleptic street hustler in My Own Private Idaho. In 1988, at age 17, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor following his role in Running on Empty.
Phoenix’s final credit was a metaphysical Western, Silent Tongue, written and directed by Sam Shepard. Before his untimely death on Halloween night, 1993, Phoenix was set to play the interviewer in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. He had also nearly completed work on the independent thriller Dark Blood, with Judy Davis.
River Phoenix died on October 31, 1993 of a drug overdose.
I will always look to river phoenix as someone who i thought was great and would have been still amazing, he was an amazing person and an outstading actor and if he were still alive today he would still be great.
James Dean:
James Dean lived a short life as he was only 24 years old when he died in a car accident.
Even though James Dean only starred a few roles as an actor his roles are still recognized today with great satisfaction. James is probobly best known for his role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, he then went on to do East of Eden where he played an awkward loner named Cal Trask and then went to do Giant in which he played Jett Rink the surely, racist farmer.
James never had quite an easy life as he was shifted between his divorced parents and in the 1940s his mother died of cancer after this he went to living with his aunt.
In high school, Dean’s overall performance was mediocre, but he successfully played on the baseball and basketball team and studied forensics and drama. After graduating from Fairmount High School on May 16, 1949, Dean moved back to California with his beagle, Maxx, to live with his father and stepmother.
He enrolled in Santa Monica College (SMCC), pledged to the Sigma Nu fraternity and majored in pre-law. Dean transferred to UCLA and changed his major to drama, which resulted in estrangement from his father. While at UCLA, he beat out 350 actors to land the role of Malcolm in Macbeth. At that time, he also began acting with James Whitmore’s actng workshop. In January 1951, he dropped out of college to pursue a career as an actor.
Dean was driving west on U.S. Highway 466 (later California State Route 46) near Cholame, California when a 1950 Ford Tudor, driven from the opposite direction by 23-year-old Cal Poly student Donald Turnupseed, attempted to take the fork onto California State Route 41 and crossed into Dean’s lane without seeing him. The two cars hit almost head on. According to a story in the October 1, 2005 edition of the Los Angeles Times, California Highway Patrol officer Ron Nelson and his partner had been finishing a coffee break in Paso Robles when they were called to the scene of the accident, where they saw a heavily-breathing Dean being placed into an ambulance. Wütherich had been thrown from the car, but survived with a broken jaw and other injuries. Dean was taken to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 5:59PM. His last known words, uttered right before impact, are said to have been “That guy’s gotta stop… He’ll see us.”
James Dean was a great icon for all people that love great actors although he did die young for as long as he was alive he really shone as an actor in hollywood and showed it all the movies that he was apart of, i will always look towards James Dean as a teenage icon for me and was just an amazing person to me.
“Dream as if you’ll forever, live as if you’ll die today”.
I choose both of these actors because they were great actors who still would have been great if they were still alive, i will always look towards them for guidance with film. RIP River Jude Phoenix and James Byron Dean.
