Credit: Dangerous Minds / Warner Bros

If all you know of the movie Rebel Without a Cause is James Dean being asked what he’s rebelling against and responding, “Whaddya got?”, then rectify that right now.

Rebel Without a Cause holds up like Atlas himself. It’s a film that depicts youthful frustration with previous generations in a way that’s so empathetic and considerate, it’s hard to believe that it became an icon for the baby boomer generation at all. You’d think they’d have learned from it, but perhaps they were distracted by how hot James Dean looks while draped across a motorcycle. Few men have ever looked better.

However, Dean is just the tip of a large, deep iceberg regarding what makes Rebel so incredibly compelling 70 years after its release. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Dean’s early ascension to the status of cultural icon rather than phenomenally talented actor stopped people from actually engaging with the text itself. One can’t really help that when you consider the truly tragic reason why he became a cultural icon, though.

A month before the release of Rebel, Dean died in a car accident at the age of 24. It’s a testament to the sheer power of Dean’s presence as an actor that he gained the reputation he has today on the strength of only three main roles in major motion pictures. He’s masterful in all three of them, but Rebel truly would almost certainly be a worthy calling card for his talents had he had the long and successful career his talent deserved afterwards.

However, his fame and the nature of his death also takes away from the fates of his two co-stars in the picture, who also suffered tragic ends in the years following Rebel.

What happened to the other stars of ‘Rebel Without a Cause’?

Dean played Jim Stark in the film, one of the three main characters and the heart of what is absolutely a love triangle but can’t be explicitly called that due to the fact that the film was made in the 1950s. On the one side is John ‘Plato’ Crawford, played exquisitely by a 17-year-old, Sal Mineo. Mineo was as smitten with James Dean as his character was with Jim Stark and while he went on to a very respectable career afterwards, his bisexuality meant that he never got the chances other actors did.

As he aged, the roles that made him famous began to dry up. Thus, he rebuilt his career as a respected theatre actor in the ’60s and ’70s, gaining particular acclaim for his lead role as a bisexual burglar in the play Your Cat is Dead in 1975. The year afterward, he was set to reprise his role in a production of the same play in Los Angeles but on his way home from a rehearsal in February that year, he was mugged mere metres from his home and stabbed in the heart. Dying at 37 years old.

While dire circumstances meant that neither Dean nor Mineo capitalised on the fame Rebel gave them, Natalie Wood absolutely was in a position to do so. She spent the ’60s as one of the biggest and most in-demand actresses in Hollywood. In fact, Rebel Without a Cause might not actually be the peak of her career, considering she was also the lead in West Side Story. However, this wasn’t enough to protect her from a tragic fate of her own, drowning in the Pacific Ocean while working on what was set to be her comeback film, 1983s Brainstorm, at the age of 43.

At the very least, the legacy all three of them leave behind, from Rebel Without a Cause and beyond, will never be forgotten.