The man who helped make James Dean a timeless icon

The photographer who did as much as anyone to establish the legacy of James Dean as a 20th century cinema icon has died in Florida at the age of 81. He was Dennis Stock, a member of the renowned Magnum agency, who had recently returned to the States after living for many years in the Provencal village of Menerbes.

His photograph of James Dean walking through Times Square in the rain, a cigarette between his lips and his body reflected in a puddle, was originally titled On Times Square but later renamed Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It was taken the year before Dean smashed his Porsche Spyder headlong into another car on September 30, 1955 and died at 24.

Stock, a US Navy veteran who joined Magnum after winning first prize in a Life magazine photo contest in 1951, had met the actor in Los Angeles at the home of the filmmaker Nicholas Ray, who was yet to direct Dean in his most famous movie, Rebel Without a Cause.

So short was the actor's cinema career that, when Stock met him at Ray's home in 1954, Dean's first big film, East of Eden, had not been released. Indeed, Stock liked to recount how when he struck up a conversation with Dean he had no idea he was even an actor. (The fact that Dean must have been one of the most striking looking people in the room was surely a giveaway, but let's not spoil the story.)

"It wasn't apparent in his appearance," Stock told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on the 50th anniversary of Dean's death. "He was not a neat dresser per se. He looked tired, but he was pleasant and interesting."

Dean took Stock to a preview of East of Eden in Santa Monica, waiting outside with his motorbike while Stock watched the movie. The photographer, hugely impressed by the young man's performance, proposed taking a series of photographs - a "visual biography". They would return to New York, where Dean lived in an apartment on West 68th Street, and also visit Indiana, where Dean had been brought up on a farm

in Fairmount.

Dean agreed and Life commissioned the essay, publishing it in 1955. The visit to Winslow Farm in Fairmount with Stock was to be Dean's last trip home before he died. The photographs taken there, including Dean posing with a hog and, spookily, climbing inside a coffin at the local funeral home, are the only professional shots ever taken of the actor in his home town.

Times Square - scene of the most enduring image - was significant because Dean studied acting under Lee Strasberg, whose Actors Studio was only a block away.

"I liked him sometimes, but not all the time," Stock told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in his 2005 interview to publicise his book, James Dean: Fifty Years Ago. "But he was like family after a while. We really bonded in Indiana. Not in New York, where he was distracted a lot. He was an insomniac and didn't get a lot of sleep and was a pain in the ass to work with."

"Pain in the ass to work with" could have been applied to Stock himself: charming off-duty, especially out walking his chocolate-brown labrador in the lanes around his French home, he was curmudgeonly and tough to handle when he was working on a new project or meticulously laying out the running order for a new book.

James Dean wasn't the only star he worked with: he photographed many jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and several other Hollywood actors and directors. One of his best loved pictures is of the young Audrey Hepburn in the back of car, resting her head on her elbow, on the set of the Billy Wilder film Sabrina in which she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart.

It was Bogart who had tipped Stock off. He told the Independent many years later: "He came to me one day and said, 'Listen, I'm gonna make a movie with a kid I think you should know more about. She's called Audrey Hepburn.'

"He [Bogart] arranged for Paramount to show me Roman Holiday. She was stunning. I rang Esquire and said, 'I've seen this terrific girl.'"

Hepburn turned out to be "an absolute sweetie. She was very un-Hollywood, which was the key to the whole thing. She wasn't glamorous. She didn't try to be glamorous."

In later years, Stock turned to photographing landscapes and modern architecture. One of his most iconic images is not of Dean or any other star, but of a field of lavender in his beloved Provence.