Premonitions

[snopes]

Comment: I heard this story in a forum and I suspect it as I can't find
anything to back it up:

The actor, Laurence Olivier had a premonition. He had gone to a
restaurant and there were no tables available (apparently there was no A
list back then) so James Dean invited him to sit with him.

After dinner, James Dean invited him to see his new Porsche in the parking
lot. Laurence Olivier got such a bad feeling off of it, he tried to
convince James Dean to get rid of it.

A week later, James Dean was killed driving it.

Laurence Olivier said he hadn't had such a premonition before or after and
he was glad of it.

[Latiam]

Hard to say. Lots of "warnings" are claimed to have happened:

And while the actor was excited to show off his newest race car, his friends weren't happy about the purchase. In the time leading up to Dean's death, friends of the actor - including Barris, Eartha Kitt and Dean's former girlfriend Ursula Andress - said that they felt that the vehicle had a malevolent presence about it.

“James, I don't like this car; it's going to kill you,” Kitt is reported to have said to Dean while the two were out for a drive the week before Dean's crash.

Around the same time, Dean introduced himself to Alec Guinness and asked the actor's opinion of the car. Upon seeing it, Guinness stated that the car was sinister, and said that if Dean got in it, he would be dead within the week.
Perhaps Dean himself sensed that he was headed for destruction. Prior to his death, he gave away a kitten that Liz Taylor gave to him on the set of Giant. His reasoning for doing so was that “some day I may go out and not come back.”

And while filming a commercial for the National Safety Council, Dean ad-libbed the words of the script from “Please Drive Safely. The life you save may your own,” to “The life you save may be mine.”

I think the bolded part is most likely to be related. .

He had it 9 days.

[RivkahChaya]

Given that Laurence Olivier would have been in England filming Richard III when Dean bought, and then crashed the car, and aside from that, Olivier was 24 years older than Dean, twice Dean's age, they didn't work on anything together-- didn't even do the same kinds of things-- and came from different schools of acting, Olivier seems like a very odd choice for the UL.

Was Olivier known for being superstitious, or something? I've never heard that, and the story even points out that Olivier never had any other type of premonition, that seems unlikely too.

This has got to be at least a 2nd generation mutation of some other story.

[KingDavid8]

I wonder how much of the "James Dean will die in this car" stuff was really just simple logic. Dean was known to be rather wild and reckless, and he just bought a car that was capable of going very, very fast. Add it all up, and you have a very real possibility that he's going to end up crashing the car and killing himself, which is exactly what happened. In hindsight, it might have felt like a "premonition" to his friends, but at the time it was probably more of a "you're just asking for trouble" kind of thing.

And the "the life you save may be mine" bit would be foreboding if he died due to someone else's recklessness, but not his own.

[Cyrano]

I once worked for a guy whose hobby was to collect and race old sports cars, and who owned a Porsche Spyder of the same model.

He always said this car was very unstable due to its design (the front axle is broader than the rear one, the weight of the rear engine only making things worse).

"No wonder James Dean died in that car" he used to say, "it's dangerous as hell - it will kill you at the slightest mistake."


... but as it was in the 80's, in a time when James Dean was seen as a god-like figure and the very symbol of Cool, the pride of owning the same car as Jimmy was stronger than caution.

[RivkahChaya]

Here's a supposed recreation, from a "crash reconstruction expert" website. I don't know anything about the people who run it, and whether they really do forensic crash reconstructions, or just watch a lot of CSI, but it does reprint the original police sketch, show a picture of the Spyder after the crash, some modern pictures of the intersection where it happened, and some contemporary, albeit B&W, pictures.

A reference I canot check, because I don't have the book (Frascella, L., Weisel, A. Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause", p.233, New York: Touchstone, 2005) claims that right before the crash, Dean's passenger told him to slow down, as the approaching car did not appear to be slowing, but Dean said "That guy's gotta stop... He'll see us."

So, apparently, Dean did in fact have the right-of-way when the crash happened. He might have been speeding, seeing as he'd been ticked for speeding right before the crash, and he certainly wasn't driving defensively, but, it does appear that the Spyder really was a major factor.

The Spyder was very low to the ground, lower than you would expect a car to be, and more importantly, was the same color as the road, on a pretty monotonous roadway.

The car was a convertible (or just plain topless), and, according to every single website I look up, I find this sentence "According to the postmortem, it is believed that Dean's head struck the front grill of the other car." Verbatim. Clearly, everyone is lifting it, uncritically and without citing, from everyone else, which I sort of funny, and if I felt like it, I'd look at dates, and try to figure out who said it first, and if that person actually had access to the postmortem report. I didn't find the postmortem report online.

Dean's passenger was thrown out of the car, and Dean seems to have been centrifuged partway into the passenger seat, so his butt was in the passenger seat, and his feet were in the wheel well of the driver's side, so it's a good bet neither one was wearing a seatbelt. However, I can't say for sure whether the car even came equipped with seatbelts in the first place.

So.

1) The accident wasn't really Dean's fault, except to the extent that he picked an "unsafe at any speed" car, and wasn't driving defensively.

2) The possibility of people looking at the car, and seeing a low-riding convertible, the same color as the road, without seatblets, and saying "Wow, that looks like a death machine" are pretty good. In fact, if no one said this to Dean (or at least to someone) upon seeing the car, before he died, that would be pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

[Auburn Red]

I've heard athe story about Alec Guinness and James Dean before. I want to say that Guinness himself confirmed it in one of his autobiographies (though taking away whether one believes in premonitions or not, if they were familiar with Dean's lifestyle it may have been seen more of as a friendly warning). But not about Laurence Olivier. I wonder if the author got them confused.
Two well known British actors around the same time, both lived to be rather old.

[RivkahChaya]

Well, Alec Guinness at least worked on a picture in the US around the time that Dean would have bought the car. The Swan was released in 1956, the same year as Giant, Dean's last film. I have no idea what the actual shooting schedules for either one were, though, and Dean worked for Warner Bros., while Guinness worked for MGM.

More plausible than Olivier, who probably wasn't in the US at all, for all of 1955.