Most exciting actor to hit Hollywood since Marlon Brando is the moody 21-year old recluse above, James Dean of Fairmount, Ind.  His performance in Elia Kazan's forthcoming East of Eden, reminiscent of Brando but distinctively his own, has already won him a starring role in another big picture, Giant.  His militantly independent offstage behavior and his scorn for movie convention have studio executives at Warner Bros. apprehensive.  In Eden his skillful portrayal of the elder son of a California rancher stems partly from his own complex personality and from elements in his own farmbred early life.
        Though shy of publicity which he feels might show him in a false light, Dean recently permitted a friend, Dennis Stock, to go back home with him to take photographs.  How he reacted to life on the farm and how it contrasts with his new one is reported on these pages.
 
 

Intense and introspective, Jimmy Dean engages in incessant self-analysis which close friends know is sincere, though it may seem to others like theatrical posing.  Back home in Indiana, he had hoped to come to an understanding of his roots, but he found something better, an awareness of his debt to the Quaker aunt and uncle who brought him up, encouraging his talents and accepting his eccentricities.  An accomplished violinist by the age of 8, Jimmy gave up music when his mother died.  In high school he was a basketball star and stage star, and won the Indiana State Dramatic Contest, but shelved ideas of acting to enroll as a prelaw student at U.C.L.A.  He gave that up too after two years, played bit parts in three movies.  When he finally hit New York he had firmly resolved on the theater and went at it with the dedication of an artist.  For his acting in The Immoralist, his second Broadway play, he won an award as one of 1954's best young actors.  From there he went on to East of Eden.
 
 

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