If you had been a teenager back at the start of 1950s then you hadn’t been invented.

The term wasn’t common currency, and there was nothing special or different about turning 13. You weren’t being targeted and marketed to, the fashions were those of your parents, your aspirations were theirs, although inside you may have rebelled, and all those wild hormones had to be strictly controlled for who knew where it could end? And then, when you were invented, you weren’t feted but feared and demonised.

I’ll leave it to a cultural anthropologist to explain the elements that combined to produce the invention – the post-war economic boom for sure, education, the growth of university attendance, more leisure time, increased travel – but if there was one person who personified it, although he was now in his early 20s, it was James Dean.

He only made three films, two of which were posthumously released, but he came to represent teenage angst, rebellion as well as ineffable cool, particularly in Rebel Without A Cause, which seen today has a pretty hackneyed plot, but in it Dean is mesmeric. And beautiful. Chiselled cheekbones, haunting eyes, a presence you can’t take your own eyes off.

There’s a powerful argument that he, with Brando and other method actors, changed film forever. Prior to Dean, male actors were strong, and the vicissitudes of their onscreen lives only made them stronger – the weepy stuff was for the female lead. They delivered their lines clearly, best profile to camera, whereas Dean mumbled, he slouched, he acted like a real person, not a movie star. Which made him huge box office, posthumously.

The director Elia Kazan, who made On The Waterfront with Brando – and ratted out fellow actors, writers and directors before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee – cast Dean in East Of Eden, loosely based on a section of the John Steinbeck novel. Kazan had seen Dean in a preview of the Broadway production of The Immoralist, a stage adaptation of the André Gide book.

In it, Dean played a devious, homosexual Arab houseboy (totally un-PC) who seduces the main character, a gay archaeologist, who has married in the hope of curbing his feelings. Dean did not like the role, or the plot – perhaps because he was homosexual himself, certainly bisexual, and didn’t want to be identified as such – and quit on opening night for the Kazan movie.

The film did only middlingly at the box office, but Dean is memorable. On the set he repeatedly changed character, challenged the other actors and improvised. The scene where he, as Cal Trask, a teenager who continually tries and fails to win the love of his father (played by Raymond Massey), breaks down in tears is unscripted. Dean was meant to walk away but the scene was so powerful that Kazan kept it in.

James Byron Dean was born in Marion, Indiana on February 8, 1931, the only child of Mildred and Winton. He was particularly close to his mother, who encouraged his acting ambitions, even building a stage in the house, making up plays together, but she died of uterine cancer when Jimmy was nine. Dean never got over her death. His father then sent him to live with his uncle and aunt on a farm in Fairmount.

It was at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio in New York which imparted the “method” – and Dean seized it. The studio has had a roster of actors pass through and go on to greatness. Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Kazan himself, clearly the connection which brought the young Jimmy to the director’s attention.

Eden might not have been a spectacular success but it was evident from the first frame he appeared in that Dean was. It was also the only one of his three films that Dean would see in its entirety before his death.

After making East Of Eden, Dean made two more films in quick succession, Rebel Without A Cause – his most famous role – and Giant, as second lead to Rock Hudson, later to be outed as gay, and also starring Elizabeth Taylor. In Giant, Dean ages from a young man to bitter old one, an acting tour de force.

In Rebel Without A Cause, Dean plays a rebellious but sensitive teenager whose family move to a new town, and he takes on local gang members, allying with fellow troubled teens, Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). It caught, or rather rejected, the mood of the times – a muted but believable Hollywood take on teenage delinquency.

It was partially shot in black and white, before the studio realised the impact it would have and then reshot it in colour. There was a strong supporting cast too, with Dennis Hopper, Edward Platt and Jim Backus, as Dean’s put-upon father.

Three weeks before the film was released another actor entered into Dean’s life. And ended it. He was the unlikely-named Donald Turnupseed, a 23-year-old university student, who was driving a Ford Tudor car towards Route 466 outside Shandon, California.

Dean was in his newly-bought Porsche Spyder, nicknamed Little Bastard, driving along 466, headed for a race meeting. It was early evening on September 30, 1955. Just seven days before Dean had spotted the legendary British actor Alec Guinness outside the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood. He asked Guinness to take a look at the Spyder, who thought the car appeared “sinister” and told Dean: “If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”

At 5.45pm, those seven days later, Turnupseed made what would now be seen as an illegal turn onto the main highway where Dean’s Spyder had right of way and collided head-on, cartwheeling the sports car several times. The 24-year-old actor was either dead or dying of a broken neck and massive internal injuries when he was pulled from the car.

Turnupseed gave just one interview to his local paper the day after the crash – “I didn’t see him coming” – and rejected all media requests for 40 years until his own death. He was haunted by it.

He was never prosecuted and hitchhiked the 70 miles to his home in Tulare where he was treated at the local hospital for minor abrasions. There is now a sign – the James Dean Memorial Junction – where the two roads and the two lives intersected, as well as a concrete and stainless steel sculpture commemorating him.

All three of the lead actors in Rebel died prematurely. Sal Mineo was stabbed to death at 37 and Natalie Wood drowned in mysterious circumstances, falling from a yacht, at the age of 43.

Dean’s death before the film’s premiere boosted the box office and while you don’t need to die to be a legend, there’s no doubt that his tragically premature death enshrined him as a cultural icon. And it has lasted 65 years. John Lennon said that “without Jimmy Dean, the Beatles would never have existed”.

His cool and rebellious image became synonymous with the spirit of rock ‘n roll. The Eagles wrote a song about him, Taylor Swift has referenced him, as have dozens of contemporary actors, James Franco played him in a film – there was stage play and film, Come Back To The 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean – and Johnny Depp fronted a radio documentary. In fashion, his style, particularly the championing of the plain white T-shirt, remains.

Most importantly, he was an extraordinary and charismatic actor, in the vanguard of a new kind of acting which rejected the wooden delivery of the previous generation, with a realism which touched deep feelings in the audience.

And he was better looking than Brando.