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For those who came of age at the turn of the millennium, actor James Van Der Beek, who has died aged 48, represented a window through which we could understand our own adolescence.
Van Der Beek rose to fame as Dawson Leery, the earnest titular character of the groundbreaking Y2K television drama Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003). The series explored youth, love and longing with wise-beyond-their-years dialogue. Dawson and his friends seemed infinitely more worldly and mature than us normal teens, yet they were universally relatable. The show tackled sex and sexuality with an honesty and directness — it featured one of the earliest depictions of a gay character in a US teen series — that was unprecedented at the time, catapulting its leads, Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, into stardom.
Van Der Beek was diagnosed with stage three bowel cancer in August 2023. He documented his experience living with the disease on social media and urged his followers to undergo colonoscopy screenings. Last September, the cast of Dawson’s Creek reunited to raise funds for the charity F Cancer and support their co-star (the actor had been forced to sell memorabilia from the show as his treatment costs surged). Van Der Beek was too ill to attend.
“He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace,” wrote his wife, Kimberly, in a statement on Wednesday. “There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come.”
The eldest of three, Van Der Beek was born on March 8 1977 in the leafy Connecticut town of Cheshire. His late mother, Melinda, was a dancer and gymnastics instructor and his father, James William Van Der Beek, a telecoms executive.
Van Der Beek developed a flair for acting as a child, first performing in school theatre projects. By the age of 15, he sought an agent in New York. A year later, his professional career began with a role in the off-Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Finding the Sun. His feature film debut arrived shortly after, playing an arrogant high school jock in 1995 coming-of-age dramedy Angus.
It was early 1997 when he took the career-making role of idealistic Dawson, a film-obsessed teenager and believer in epic, once-in-a-lifetime love. While Dawson was flawed, judgmental and moody, he nonetheless served as the moral heart of the show.
For teens at the time, Dawson’s Creek was everything. With his tousled golden hair and Disney prince looks, Van Der Beek rocketed to heart-throb status. My high school classmates and I would cut out images of the actor from magazines and tape them to our locker doors. In 1998, Van Der Beek was named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World”. His presence anywhere attracted hordes of screeching adolescents. In a 2024 interview he joked that his rapid surge to fame resulted in “the lamest form of PTSD ever”, a Pavlovian response to pause at the sound of youthful titter. “[Then I think] Dude, get over yourself . . . They’re not about to come chase after you!”
Van Der Beek soon scooped up film roles, most notably as the star quarterback in the 1999 sports drama Varsity Blues and as a hedonistic and manipulative Sean Bateman in the 2002 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction.
Post-Dawson’s he remained a fixture on primetime TV, featuring on the police procedural Criminal Minds and fashion comedy Ugly Betty, and with bit parts on How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family. The absurdity of his star power in minor guest roles worked to great comedic effect.
Van Der Beek also relished in playfully skewering his teen idol image. He was at his most charming when parodying the mythology that surrounded him, first in the Kevin Smith comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), in which he played an exaggerated version of himself, and later in sitcom Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment 23 (2012-2013) as James Van Der Beek, a self-absorbed actor desperate to shed his teen star image, who uses his fame to seduce women and does charity work by being photographed with “the photogenic homeless”. He was in on the joke, and fans and critics alike loved him for it.
Van Der Beek will appear posthumously in The Gates, a thriller film, and Elle, the upcoming Legally Blonde prequel.
In a letter paying tribute to the actor, Dawson’s co-star Holmes celebrated his “bravery, compassion, selflessness and strength”, adding: “[He had] an appreciation for life and the action taken to live life with the integrity that life is art.”
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