-Excerpt taken from Elizabeth: The Life
of Elizabeth Taylor by Alexander Walker. This describes Dean
as being a rude co-star to Taylor:
"James Dean proved just the opposite of [Rock] Hudson; he was cold, indifferent and rude to Elizabeth. A shy, intensely insecure actor, he was a selfish co-star. She particularly resented his imperious habit of calling, in the middle of a take, "Cut - I fucked it up." Stevens resented it even more. But Dean's East of Eden had opened a few months earlier, in March 1955, and he had become an instant icon to teenagers, the new audience Stevens had to learn to "talk" to. Dean knew the body language of the inarticulate kids. So although Stevens dispised him, he deferred to him. Elizabeth, on the receiving end of Dean's egoism, found it demeaning-and physically exhausting-to have to do and redo the scenes while he explored his Method rapport with the character..."
"...Only a few scenes were
left to shoot back at Warners, and, as his rule, Stevens brought the stars
and the leading crew members together in a screening room to view the rushes.
This was part of his method of asserting authority. Elizabeth had
to endure his continuous commentary on why she was no good in that take,
a better in this one, had "something" in the other, would be "usuable"
in the next, and so on.
In the middle of the screening,
Stevens took a call, grunted a few times, hung up, then ordered the lights
turned up. He announced that James Dean, who had finished his role,
had been killed that afternoon in a car collision.
Feeling small and crushed
by someone else's castastrophe, Elizabeth was still visibly shocked when
she ran across Stevens in the studio parking lot.
"I can't believe it George."
"I can," he answered, in
the tone of a man who had just seen the last act of a play of which he
had not been over-fond.
That night, the assistant
director called. George expected Elizabeth on time in the morning
to pick up the reaction shots of a scene she had done with Dean a few days
before. She realized, with anguish, that she would now be "reacting"
to a man who lay in a funeral home at Paso Robles. On the last day
of work on the film, she collapsed with stomach cramps and was rushed to
hospital. Giant had been a grueling experience. It was
not over yet. After treatment for a twisted colon, she had to go
back to the studio and finish the scene.
Yet film can be a strangely
forgiving thing. Giant contains almost no signs of her suffering,
and many indications of how she had matured. Though required to end
the film as the mother of a teenage daughter - played by Carroll Baker
- with no help from any agency except the blue hair-dye that passes for
signs of ageing in Hollywood movies, Elizabeth in her early scenes shows
a girl toughening before our eyes into a potential matriarch. And
the scene where Dean entertains her to tea in his shack demonstrated, through
her skill at hanging on to another actor's words (and pauses), that the
quality of "presence" can more than hold its own against the Method actor's
mannered mumble..."