Actor James Van Der Beek arriving on the Emmy Awards in 2019.
Valerie Macon/AFP through Getty Photos
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Valerie Macon/AFP through Getty Photos
James Van Der Beek — finest identified for his function as Dawson Leery within the hit late Nineties and early aughts present Dawson’s Creek — has died. He was 48. Van Der Beek introduced his analysis of Stage 3 colon most cancers in November 2024.
His household wrote on Instagram on Wednesday, “Our beloved James David Van Der Beek handed peacefully this morning. He met his remaining days with braveness, religion, and charm. There may be a lot to share relating to his needs, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. These days will come. For now we ask for peaceable privateness as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and pal.”
Van Der Beek began appearing when he was 13 in Cheshire, Conn., after a soccer harm stored him off the sector. He performed the lead in a college manufacturing of Grease, obtained concerned with native theater, and fell in love with performing. A number of years later, he and his mom went to New York Metropolis to signal the then-16 yr outdated actor with an agent.
However Van Der Beek did not get away as a star till he was 21, when he landed the lead function of 15-year-old Dawson Leery, an aspiring filmmaker, in Dawson’s Creek.
Van Der Beek’s life modified perpetually with this function. The teenager coming-of-age present was an enormous hit, with thousands and thousands of weekly viewers over 6 seasons. It helped each set up the fledgling WB community and the increase of teen-centered dramas, says Lori Bindig Yousman, a media professor at Sacred Coronary heart College and the writer of Dawson’s Creek: A Vital Understanding.
“Dawson’s actually got here on the scene and felt totally different, regarded totally different,” Bindig Yousman says.
It was totally different, she factors out, from different standard teen exhibits on the time resembling Beverly Hills, 90210. “It wasn’t these wealthy children. It was presupposed to be regular children, however they had been slightly bit extra clever and conscious of the world round them … It was attainable indirectly. It was reflective.”
The Dawson’s drama centered round love, hardships, relationships, faculty and intercourse — generally pushing the boundaries when it got here to teenagers discussing intercourse. Van Der Beek’s character Dawson was a moody, earnest dreamer, generally so earnest he got here throughout as a “unhappy sack,” says Bindig Yousman. He had a seasons lengthy on-again off-again on-screen relationship together with his finest pal Joey, performed by Katie Holmes. Bindig Yousman says Van Der Beek rapidly grew to become seen as a heartthrob.
“I believe he was very secure for lots of tweens, and that is once we began to get the tween advertising and marketing,” she says, referring to the eye paid to him by magazines like Teen Folks and Teen Superstar. “And so as a result of he wasn’t a foul man, he was conventionally engaging … He positively appealed to the plenty.”
Dawson’s Creek launched the careers of not simply of James Van Der Beek, however his costars Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams. All went on to have profitable careers within the leisure trade.
Regardless of his success, Van Der Beek did not land many roles that rose to that very same degree of fame he loved in Dawson’s Creek. Maybe as a result of audiences related him a lot with Dawson Leery, it was troublesome to separate him from that character.
Nonetheless, he starred within the 1999 coming of age movie Varsity Blues, as a highschool soccer participant who needs to be greater than only a jock. In 2002’s Guidelines of Attraction, he performed a poisonous school drug supplier.
And he really parodied himself within the sitcom Do not Belief the B—- in Condo 23. In it, he is a self-obsessed actor unsuccessfully making an attempt to get folks to see him as somebody apart from the movie star from Dawson’s Creek. In an episode the place he decides to show an appearing class, the scholars ignore the lesson and as an alternative pester him to carry out a monologue from the present.
In actual life as properly, the floppy blond-haired Dawson Leery is the one which stole followers’ hearts, however Bindig Yousman says Van Der Beek nonetheless loved a robust fanbase that adopted him to different exhibits, even once they had been solely smaller cameos.
Within the 2024 Instagram put up about his most cancers, Van Der Beek mentioned “Every year, roughly 2 billion folks world wide obtain this analysis … I’m one in every of them.” (There have been about 18.5 million new circumstances of most cancers world wide in 2023, a quantity that researchers say is projected to rise.) Van Der Beek leaves behind six kids.
The solid of Dawson’s Creek reunited to lift cash for the nonprofit F Most cancers, which focuses on prevention, detection and assist for folks affected by most cancers. They learn the pilot episode at a Broadway theater in New York Metropolis in September 2025. His former co-star Michelle Williams organized the reunion. James Van Der Beek was unable to carry out, on account of his sickness, however contributed an emotional video that was proven onstage. In it, he thanked his crew and castmates, and the Dawson’s Creek followers for being “one of the best followers on this planet.”
