When the biggest American rock star of the Nineties, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, removed the top of his head with a shotgun, his mother commented that her boy had ‘joined the stupid club’ – meaning the crowded fraternity of star-crossed young celebrities who died before their time.

James Dean would have been sixty-five last February – a rebel with a free bus pass. He never made it, of course, expiring in the gloaming of a California freeway after wrapping his Porsche Spyder around a station wagon driven by a young man called