The director who called Angelina Jolie the new James Dean: “There was something about her”
The second James Dean appeared on screens in the early 1950s, history changed.
It wasn’t just that a star was born or that Hollywood had just gained a new leading man. It was more than that Dean came to represent a very specific and undeniable type of power – one that another director would later see in Angelina Jolie.
James Dean left a mark far, far beyond his filmography. In terms of actual work, Dean didn’t really take on too many remarkable projects. His earliest works were relatively small and rather dull. It wasn’t really until East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 that he stepped into the limelight fully with two incredible leading performances.
But then, later that same year, he was dead. Some would say that, morbidly, that’s where Dean’s grip on culture comes from. He died at the age of only 24 in a terrible car crash, meaning that, as horrific as it sounds, he died a glamorous death and would have been a beautiful corpse as the new star was wiped out in a dramatic fashion.
It’s more than that, though. From the moment Rebel Without A Cause was released, Dean played a role in launching counterculture and changing the face of the typical frontman. Before this point, the stars were clean-cut, all-American good men, or they were cowboys. Dean was neither, as he began to bring in a different brand of hot – one that was at once both the rebellious bad boy, and a more effeminate, pretty type of beauty.
Overwhelmingly, what Dean had was complete and utter, undeniable star power. The world knew that the second they saw his face, and then he had the talent to back it up. It’s a rare thing to stumble upon, but once somebody does, it’s clear that the person in question was always going to be somebody special.
That’s exactly how Annette Haywood-Carter felt about Angelina Jolie as she cast the actor in Foxfire. It was one of Jolie’s first movies, and certainly one of her first notable roles that made people pay attention, but the director already knew she was bound for stardom.
“Angelina, as a human being, was otherworldly, even at the age of 19,” she said. Obviously, there is the matter of beauty as Jolie is, and always has been, noted for her almost unreal attractiveness. But for Haywood-Carter, it was more than that, just as it was for James Dean.
“There was something about her,” she continued, “She had so much personal power as a human being that she could just come through that space and effortlessly be that James Dean-like icon.”
It suited the character, too, as the director saw Jolie’s role as Legs as a Dean type. “I saw Legs as an icon. She’s James Dean, right?” she said, “Legs is the disruptor. She just blows through town, disrupts the system, and blows out of town, and everything’s different because of her.”
Just as Dean’s character of Jim Stark disrupts the town on his motorbike, and how Dean himself disrupted Hollywood, she saw Jolie, and the role she played, as the same brand of rebel.
