James Dean’s Death (1955)
When actor James Dean died in a car crash at the young age of 23, nobody saw it coming—nobody, that is, but his fellow thespian Alec Guinness. As the future Jedi Master (Guinness played Ben Kenobi in the Star Wars movies) explained in a BBC interview in 1977, he met Dean only once at a Hollywood restaurant.
Dean showed off his new car to Guinness, bragging that it could reach speeds of 150 mph.
“Some strange thing came over me,” Guinness recalled. “I said, ‘Please do not get into that car, because if you do… by 10 o’clock at night next Thursday, you’ll be dead.’” Guinness didn’t just predict the Rebel Without a Cause star’s death, but the exact date—September 30, 1955—it would happen.
