Dead famous: The live fast die young cult of film

There is nothing particularly glamorous about Hollywood stars dying young. Kenneth Anger's scurrilous books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II go out of their way to emphasise just how squalid the premature deaths of many young Hollywood stars really were.

They have photographs of corpses slumped on floors, pictures of police wheeling away the body of Marilyn Monroe and one of the workers on a bright summer day busily sealing her crypt. Anger's prose is even more morbid than the imagery that accompanies it. If a star has committed suicide, he will chronicle just how many barbiturates or Seconal capsules the star took. If there is a trail of vomit leading to the bathroom, he won't neglect to mention it.

Anger isn't alone. When beautiful and talented movie stars suffer untimely deaths, it can often prompt feelings of envious scorn. The grim jokes follow, as do the cod psychological explanations for their behaviour. Somehow, it is inferred, the stars' lifestyles are to blame. The vilification, though, is nothing to the adulation that the stars will also sometimes receive in the wake of their deaths.

Having seen their idols pulled down, fans want to deify them anew. Anthropologists would surely have a field day analysing the wildly contradictory behaviour that the death of movie stars so often provokes. As Anger writes: "For the movie audience, the suicide of a star was the ultimate scandal... for a star – or even a familiar featured player or character actor – to commit self-murder was unthinkable. They had money and fame, everything we wanted – and it still wasn't enough."

Still, the old clichés about death being a good career move ring true... and the studios and marketing gurus are always quick to see an upside, when there is one.

Rudolph Valentino, the so-called "Latin Lover", set the template for movie stars dying young and then achieving a level of celebrity denied them while they were alive. When Valentino died of peritonitis in 1926, his career wasn't exactly in the doldrums. Even so, few could have foreseen the mass hysteria his death would provoke.

The novelist John Dos Passos was so struck by the outpourings of grief that he included a vivid description of the star's funeral in his book, U.S.A. "In the muggy rain the cops lost control... the funeral chapel was gutted, men and women fought over a flower, a piece of wallpaper, a piece of the broken plate-glass window. Parked cars were overturned and smashed. When finally the mounted police after repeated charges beat the crowd off Broadway, where the traffic was tied up for two hours, they picked up 28 separate shoes, a truckload of umbrellas, papers, hats, torn-off sleeves."

The reaction to the death of James Dean in a car crash in his Porsche on 30 September 1955 eclipsed even that of Valentino. Teen audiences outside the US couldn't entirely identify with Dean's most famous film, Rebel Without A Cause, simply because their circumstances were so different to those portrayed in the movie.

Nonetheless, what every adolescent in the Western world immediately understood was the unease that Dean articulated – the ever more evident tension between the adult and the teen world. He was the standard bearer for disaffected teenagers everywhere. When it came to portraying angst-ridden teen loners, nobody could match him. He combined defiance and vulnerability – something his own death seemed to epitomise. His friend Frank Mazzola remembers driving with him in a car through Laurel Canyon. Dean was utterly reckless behind the wheel. "He was going round blind curves. If there had been cars there, we would have been dead. When we got to Mullholland Drive, we hit some dirt and the car started sliding. By the time it stopped, I could touch the edge of the mountain."

Later, when Mazzola heard the news of Dean's death, he thought back to his own experiences in a car with Dean. "When I heard Jimmy died, I was in shock. I flashed back on the ride we took," Mazzola told me when I interviewed him on the 50th anniversary of Dean's death. "I remember that on that ride I thought this guy was immortal. Nothing is going to stop him getting his way. He owns the road in front of him and the world is in front of that."

Today that immortality still translates to DVD and merchandising sales.

River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1993, has been less kindly treated by posterity. At the time of his death, the 23-year-old star of My Own Private Idaho was close to completing work on a new movie, Dark Blood, directed by George Sluizer. The film was never completed. Sluizer realised there were several critical scenes still to shoot that could not be done without Phoenix. That meant there was no way for the studio to cash in on the enhanced visibility of the deceased star. It also meant audiences were denied what could have been Phoenix's most arresting performance. Phoenix certainly hasn't been forgotten, but nor has he become a Dean-like pop cultural icon. With Dean, there was a sense that his image was already set and he had done his definitive work. With Phoenix, there was simply the frustration that he wasn't able to challenge himself further as an actor.

Amid all the hoopla over Heath Ledger's Oscar chances for his performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight, it is easy to forget the circumstances of his suicide and to overlook the real reasons for most of the deaths that Anger so assiduously chronicles in his Hollywood Babylon books. The stars Anger writes about were losing their health or their looks; they were spurned; they were in unhappy relationships; they were in debt. In short, they killed themselves for the same prosaic reasons that other people do. Anger points out that the film industry's suicides were mainly actors and actresses. Very few sound men or script girls seemed inclined to kill themselves. That is hardly surprising. The stars had much more vested in their looks and personalities than those working behind the cameras. When their careers stuttered, their self-esteem plummeted.

For every Dean, Monroe, Ledger or Valentino, there are many other movie actors whose deaths are noticed only in passing. Brad Renfro died earlier this year, but there wasn't a mass outpouring of grief. Then again, Renfro hadn't just made a film. There was no chance to see him posthumously on screen in a big new movie – an experience that is morbid, uncanny and that somehow has always drawn audiences to cinemas.

'The Dark Knight' opens on 25 July

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