James Van Der Beek obituary: fresh-faced Dawson’s Creek star
As a boy, James Van Der Beek was sports mad and dreamed of playing in the Superbowl, said The Times. But aged 13, he suffered a “severe concussion” during a football match, and was advised by a doctor to quit for a year.
To the surprise of the other jocks at his high school, he swapped the locker room for the glee club. He took the lead role in a school production of “Grease”, and at 16 he appeared off Broadway in a play by Edward Albee. Four years after that, Van Der Beek, who has died aged 48, won the role that made him famous, in the 1990s coming-of-age TV drama “Dawson’s Creek”.
With his background, he was perfect for the part of the show’s titular protagonist, Dawson Leery, who was tall and muscular, but also sensitive, introspective, and given to implausibly sophisticated musings. “It’s not about the kiss – it’s about the journey and creating a sustaining magic,” Dawson reflects in one episode, while watching “From Here to Eternity”.
James Van Der Beek was born in 1977 and brought up in Connecticut. His father was a telecoms executive, his mother a dancer. When he told her that he wanted to be an actor, aged 15, she drove him to New York to find an agent. Although he got good notices for his role in the Albee play, he spent much of the next few years, he said, “failing auditions for commercials”. He was 20, and at college, by the time he was cast as Dawson – a 15-year-old film buff living in a coastal town in Massachusetts, who is nursing a crush on his tomboy neighbour Joey (Katie Holmes).
“With a quartet of smart, articulate 15-year-olds completed by Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, the show was an instant hit,” said The Daily Telegraph. Over six seasons, broadcast in dozens of countries, it tracked its characters and their intertwined love lives as they navigated the journey towards adulthood, while exploring serious themes such as mental health, divorce, consent and addiction.
Success, Van Der Beek would reflect, had not come overnight – but his life changed overnight. In 1998, the year that the series launched, he was voted one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People; in public, he was mobbed by young fans. He said that for years, he had walked around “in fear of teenage girls”, and that people seemed no longer to regard him as a human being, so much as a “novelty item”. Still, the show’s success also opened doors. While “Dawson’s Creek” was still running, he starred in the box-office hit “Varsity Blues”; in 2002, he had a lead role in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s “The Rules of Attraction”.
But though he continued to act in films and on TV, he found it harder to move on from “Dawson’s Creek” than its other young stars, and some of his later parts were send-ups of the show. Asked in 2023 what advice he’d give to his younger self, he said: “Don’t be surprised if six years of work gets reduced to a three-second GIF of you crying.” He was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2023. Last year, he had to auction off his TV memorabilia to pay his medical bills. Married twice, he is survived by his second wife, Kimberly, and their six children.