Some of James Dean’s lesser-known habits might change your impression of the 1950s Hollywood heartthrob.

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Though his life was sadly a short one, James Dean achieved the sort of success most people can only dream of. Thanks to his talent as an actor, he became a Hollywood icon and a symbol of teen rebellion. He was also considered to be an incredibly attractive man; but behind the scenes there were struggles and some decidedly un-sexy habits.

Dean had a difficult childhood; he was always close to his mother, Mildred, but she died of uterine cancer when he was just nine years old. Dean, who had no brothers or sisters, was left with his father, Winton, who didn’t really know how to look after him. As a result, the latter shipped his young son off to live with an uncle and aunt.

Dean’s uncle and aunt Marcus and Ortense sent him to Fairmount High School, where the young boy did very well. He was incredibly popular and showed a wide range of talents; the future star learned to play the violin and tap-dance, plus he competed in basketball and baseball tournaments. And of course, Dean also had an interest in drama.

An autobiographical letter which Dean wrote for a school assignment in 1948 speaks to what his youth was like and alludes to the grief he suffered over his mother. He wrote for the piece, “Mom became ill and passed out of my life at the age of nine. I never knew the reason for mom’s death; in fact, it still preys on my mind.”

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Dean’s letter, reprinted on his official website, also revealed that he knew from an early age that he would be an actor. In it, he confidently stated, “I think my life will be devoted to art and dramatics. And there are so many different fields of art it would be hard to foul-up, and if I did, there are so many different things to do… I got it, and I know if I better myself that there will be no match. A fellow must have confidence.”

Dean did indeed devote himself to art and dramatics, but there was a consequence. Initially, he chose to study law at Santa Monica College; however, the actor later decided to change to UCLA and do drama. As a result of that decision, Dean fell out with his father, and reportedly the two of them never ended up having a close relationship at all.

Dean had success in acting right from the start; he performed in the play Macbeth at UCLA, and later a friend hooked him up with a small role in an advert for Pepsi Cola. A producer then noticed him singing on the set of the commercial and cast him as John the Apostle in an Easter TV special.

Things were going well for Dean, and in 1952 he sent a letter back to his Fairmount family informing them of his progress. It read, “I have made great strides in my craft. After months of auditioning, I am very proud to announce that I am a member of the Actors Studio. The greatest school of the theater.”

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Dean continued, “Very few get into [the Actors Studio], and it is absolutely free. It is the best thing that can happen to an actor. I am one of the youngest to belong. If I can keep this up and nothing interferes with my progress, one of these days, I might be able to contribute something to the world.”

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And Dean wasn’t wrong; after starring on TV shows such as Robert Montgomery Presents and General Electric Theater, he was cast in one of the movies that would come to define his career: East of Eden. As a result, in 1954 Dean headed to Los Angeles to begin playing the role of Cal Trask.

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Interestingly, Dean improvised some of his scenes on the set of East of Eden. At one point in the film, the script called for Dean’s Cal to run away from his father after the man refuses to take money from him. Instead, the tearful actor hugged him close, and the impressed director ended up using that take for the finished product.

Interestingly, both East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause have Dean playing an angry, disaffected teenager. Both roles also feature a failed father-son relationship in some depth. So it’s not hard to imagine that Dean called on aspects of his personal life in order to pull off such good performances.

In fact, Dean’s personal life was every bit as interesting as his movies. He had multiple girlfriends throughout his time in Hollywood and before. Back at UCLA he dated a woman called Beverly Wills, but they broke up after Dean reacted angrily to another man he saw her dancing with. At the time, a fight between the two men nearly broke out after Dean had threatened the individual.

However, Dean’s best-known relationship in his short life was with Italian actress Pier Angeli. The two appeared to be seriously in love, as the latter recalled In her 1974 book James Dean: The Mutant King: A Biography. She wrote, “We used to go together to the California coast and stay there secretly in a cottage on a beach far away from prying eyes.”

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Angeli continued, “We would talk about ourselves and our problems, about the movies and acting, about life and life after death. We had a complete understanding of each other. We were like Romeo and Juliet, together and inseparable. Sometimes on the beach we loved each other so much we just wanted to walk together into the sea holding hands because we knew then that we would always be together.”

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It was all very romantic, but Angeli’s mother reportedly disapproved of her relationship with Dean. She disliked the bad-boy image Dean projected, nor did she want her daughter to marry a man who wasn’t Catholic. And Warner Bros., where Dean was contracted, also didn’t want him to end up tied down.

In the end, the Dean-Angeli relationship wasn’t meant to be and in 1954, after finishing filming on East of Eden, the former went to New York City. While he was there, Angeli suddenly announced that she was marrying another man: Vic Damone. The wedding, which took place a mere month from then, was allegedly watched by Dean from his motorcycle, though the actor denied the claim.

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Dean was linked with several other women besides Angeli: including Liz Sheridan and Ursula Andress. But rumors have persisted that the young actor was bisexual and that he had affairs with other prominent Hollywood men, such as Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson. The latter was gay, although he attempted to keep it a secret, and Brando was himself bisexual.

Darwin Porter, author of the 2016 biography James Dean – Tomorrow Never Comes, told the Daily Express that year that he believed the actor “would sleep with anybody to get ahead.” He also claimed that although Dean “didn’t have a great body, had two false front teeth and was often rude,” both women and men “threw themselves at him.”

And Dean did indeed have two false teeth. These were the result of a childhood accident; the future star had swung on a trapeze in his uncle’s barn, fallen off and smashed his two front teeth out. Though Dean told a different version of the story as an adult – he would claim that he actually lost them in a motorcycle crash.

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Dean apparently also liked to shock people by casually pulling out his false teeth at inopportune times. He had been born in a time when the average person didn’t tend to brush their teeth every day the way we do now, and reportedly plenty of his back teeth were missing as well. Ironically, his estranged father was actually a dentist, too.

Despite being a sex symbol and a very photogenic man, there were aspects of Dean’s personality and lifestyle that definitely wouldn’t be seen as attractive today. Like many people of his era, he smoked; and his image in Rebel Without A Cause with a cigarette in his mouth came to define the actor.

Dean reportedly had a magic trick he liked to show off. He would sometimes put a flaming match right into his mouth alongside an unlit cigarette, and then pull out a burning one. It was clever and no doubt made people positively swoon, but it’s safe to assume he probably ended up with several burns in his mouth as a result.

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And the young rebel had a few other strange and sometimes unhygienic habits. According to actor Dennis Hopper, who appeared with Dean in both Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, the latter once peed in front of onlookers in order to calm his nerves about an upcoming scene he had to do.

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Then there were the clothes and the occasional lack of washing. Despite his status as a sex symbol, Dean reportedly wasn’t too bothered about what he looked like. Sometimes, he would wear pants fastened with safety pins and once attended a formal lunch wearing dirty jeans and no shoes.

Perhaps these issues would have been fixed eventually, but Dean tragically died in a car crash before his career advanced any further. On September 30, 1955, the 24-year-old actor was killed when his car – a Porsche 550 Spyder allegedly nicknamed “Little B*****d” – collided with another vehicle.

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And there were a lot of odd coincidences and spooky stories surrounding Dean’s death. For a start, during a featurette to promote Giant in 1955, actor Gig Young asked Dean questions about racing, concluding with, “Do you have any special advice for the young people who drive?” Dean answered, “Take it easy driving – uh, the life you might save might be mine.”

For his part, famous actor Alec Guinness had a story about the car Dean died in. Not long before the heartthrob passed away, he had apparently showed off the new Porsche to the veteran actor. Guinness claimed that he’d warned him that he should never get in it again, or he would be dead within a week. And, tragically, this indeed happened.

Dean’s unexpected death cemented his status as an icon of the 1950s. Over 2,400 fans turned up outside the church for his funeral, which took place in his childhood home of Fairmount. The actor was buried at Park Cemetery there, and his grave became a pilgrimage site for those who had loved him as an actor.

Some people think Dean’s death was almost inevitable given his lifestyle. According to Porter in his Daily Express interview, “Dean didn’t have a death wish. He had too much to live for. But he was a thrillseeker with a love for speed and liked to tempt death so that he could experience life all the more. He paid the ultimate price.”

The year after Dean died, Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray wrote a piece for Daily Variety about the young actor. And the piece went into quite a lot of detail about the man and his habits. Indeed, as the person who had helmed arguably the most famous film Dean appeared in, Ray knew him well.

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Ray talked about Dean’s lack of hygiene, writing, “There were days when he did not shave. He dressed casually, untidily, which was invariably interpreted as a gesture of revolt. Not entirely true. For one thing, it saved time, and [Dean] detested waste… In the same way he would forgo shaving because there was something more important to do.”

The director believed that these habits were “self-protective” for Dean. Ray wrote, “If you ride a motorcycle, you travel by yourself. Sleeping in a studio dressing room, you have complete solitude. He could leave, but nobody could come in. He shied away from social convention, from manners, because they suggested disguise. He wanted his self to be naked.”

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Ray mused, “There were probably very few directors with whom [Dean] could ever have worked. To work with him meant exploring his nature, trying to understand it; without this, his powers of expression were frozen. He retreated, he sulked. He always wanted to make a film in which he could personally believe, but it was never easy for him.”

In the piece Ray also revealed that Dean’s love of magic went beyond just the odd cigarette trick. According to him, the actor “wanted to meet Vampira because he had been studying magic –was she really possessed, as her television program suggested, by satanic forces?” Apparently, she wasn’t, and it left Dean disappointed.

Ray also claimed that Dean had strange ways of interacting with people. Once, he had observed a woman cradling a cushion like a baby, and asked her, “Can’t you have a child of your own?” She ran away and began to tear up, because he was correct: the woman and her husband had just become adoptive parents instead.

Elsewhere, over the years there have been rumors that Dean had a dark side to him. Author Darwin Porter told the Daily Express that the teen idol was “difficult, selfish and insecure” and sometimes carried a knife. Allegedly, he once used it to cut his own wrists on stage while performing a scene. And Ray stated in his Daily Variety piece that Dean kept a gun to hand.

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Ray wrote, “[Dean] kept a Colt .45 in his dressing room at [Warner Bros.]… Inside the studio, he found a sanctuary of steel and concrete, and at night he could be alone in this closed, empty kingdom. Perhaps the revolver was a symbol – of self-protection, of warning to others.” Later, he suggested Dean’s gun “guarded this world of self-respect.”

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To this day, so many stories circulate about Dean that it’s hard to tell truth from fiction. For example, a tale still circulates that Dean’s car was cursed, which is only exacerbated by the fact that no one appears to know what eventually happened to the vehicle. And, as with so many celebrities who died young, there’s an urban legend that he’s not really dead.

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And the fascination with Dean continues to this day. In 2019 it was announced that, via CGI, he would “act” in a new movie titled Finding Jack. The creators had sought permission from Dean’s family, but it sparked a major discussion about the ethics of bringing actors “back from the dead.” After all, though he became a legend, Dean was very much a real person – and a flawed one.