My biggest influences as an actor were Marlon Brando, and I really dug James Dean.
I was in a movie with Marlon Brando. Now, I didn't have any scenes with Marlon Brando, but I had scenes with Martin Sheen and was around Dennis Hopper, who was a child actor in the studio system and was enamored of James Dean, as was Martin, and they were all sort of disciples of Brando.
I'm not James Dean. And no one else is, either.
At one point or another, everybody gets called 'the new James Dean.'
I read a quote by James Dean when I was 17; he said, 'I'd rather starve than do a whole bunch of work that I don't care about.' The older I got, the more I understood what he was saying. If I want to do a whole lot of work that I don't care about, then I would probably be working in a law office somewhere.
Anyone can be James Dean for a day.
I myself am a great James Dean fan. He had this aura and enigma about him.
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
James Dean and Dennis Hopper were members of the health club I went to.
I was a dozy boy; I'd like to have been like James Dean, but I was more Arthur Askey - pathetically rebellious in a cheeky, chappy sort of way.
