Would James Dean have been a Newman or a Brando?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/14/the-legacy-of-james-dean

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What if he'd lived, James Byron Dean? What if he'd never ploughed his Porsche Spyder into that oncoming station wagon, had won his auto race that afternoon in Paso Robles, and gone back to work after the weekend to reshoot his final drunk scene from Giant, the one he'd botched the week before?

Would he have had Paul Newman's career: expertly managed, disciplined, intelligent, building himself year upon year towards the iconic status he finally achieved, and two-page spread obits on his death? It's not implausible to think of Newman as someone who benefited directly from Dean's death – he inherited Dean's role in the 1956 boxing picture Somebody Up There Likes Me – or as an actor who many times in the late 50s and 60s played characters (Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Billy the Kid, Fast Eddie Felson) that one can easily imagine Dean playing. Several of those characters, Hud in particular, are obvious variants on Dean's ranch-hand wildcatter Jett Rink in Giant. Dean and Newman even looked alike.

Or would he have had Marlon Brando's career? This seems more likely, as he shared many of Brando's ideas about acting and brought many method-based inspirations to his performances. One was the unexpected bear hug Dean threw on an exasperated Raymond Massey, who played his ramrod-straight father in East Of Eden, and expected the scene to end very differently, with Dean fleeing into the night. Director Elia Kazan, used to this kind of thing from Brando, went with Dean's approach. That suggests the kind of actor who, like Brando, considered himself a co-auteur of his movies. Only a great and flexible director, like Kazan with Dean or Bertolucci with Brando on the genuinely collaborative Last Tango In Paris, is likely to allow that for long.

What we have left of Dean is three movies – two great, one a masterpiece – some scraps of TV drama, a beautiful corpse and 59 years of legend burnishing, character demolition, competing schools of biographers, elevation to gay-icon status, face on a postage stamp, and a whole lot of "what-if?" East Of Eden remains one of the five or six Elia Kazan movies I still like, while Giant, no less cumbersome and overblown than much of George Stevens's work, succeeds because it is as gargantuan as its title. For me, Rebel Without A Cause is less an overheated, woefully dated treatise on suburban teenage angst than a Nick Ray movie about colour, as in Technicolor, particularly the colour red, and about spatial relationships, as defined by CinemaScope.

They're all I need of Dean and his thespian style. It's enough that he inspired generations of actors. The comet burned out, but the million mile-long tail of the comet's influence is the history of acting in the last six decades.