James Dean’s best friend

Martin Landau has outlived many of his contemporaries, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian (U.K.). As a young actor in Hollywood he briefly dated Marilyn Monroe and became great friends with James Dean. Did Dean seem destined to die young? “No, no, no,” says Landau, who played agent Rollin Hand on the TV series Mission: Impossible. “Jimmy never talked about dying; Jimmy talked about living. Jimmy’s only concern was that he would become an old boy, like Mickey Rooney. When Elia Kazan tested actors for East of Eden, Paul Newman and Jimmy auditioned on the same day. Paul looked like a man when he was 20, whereas Jimmy was still playing high school kids at 23. That bothered him a bit. But Jimmy did not want to die.” Landau is now 84. Recently, he walked past a movie-memorabilia shop in Prague, and in the window was a life-size cardboard cutout of Dean. “I looked at Jimmy, frozen in time, 24 when he died. And my reflection in the window was right over his face. My focus shifted, and all of a sudden I’m looking at this old guy in the glass. White hair and wrinkles. It struck me oddly; it was really weird. That’s the Jimmy I know,” he says. “And look what happened to me.”

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