As the world mourns the loss of legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor, newly-released details from a 1997 interview bring up a shocking secret in the life of another golden-age actor: James Dean
According to The Daily Beast, writer Kevin Sessums interviewed Taylor for a cover story for POZ, an American magazine dedicated to AIDS activism. It was there that the actress let him in on a secret about Dean:
“I loved Jimmy. I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die. OK? When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister, “
Simmons was sworn to secrecy, but was told that she thought it hurt him for the rest of his life:
“I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did…We talked about it a lot. During ‘Giant’ we’d stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me.”
Taylor and Dean starred together in 1956’s GIANT, a film in which Dean earned his second posthumous Best Actor Academy Award nomination. The actor was killed in a car accident in 1955 at the age of 24.
Taylor died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for the past six weeks.