James Van Der Beek was just 20 years old when he began filming Dawson’s Creek in 1997 and still just about able to pass for the 15-year-old title character of the much-loved teen drama.
With his golden hair and expressive eyes, Van Der Beek made an immediate impression and it wasn’t long before fans across the world were smitten. Dawson was the poetic, sensitive heart of the show, and when it came to an end six seasons later in 2003, viewers were heartbroken. In the final episode, Dawson’s younger sister Lilly asked him what a soulmate is. “It’s like a best friend, but more,” replies Dawson. “A soulmate is someone you carry with you forever.”
In that way, Van Der Beek, who has died at the age of 48, became the soulmate of a generation. His fans had been braced for his premature death since the actor first revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer in November 2024, but there was nonetheless shock when his wife Kimberly announced Wednesday that the actor had “passed peacefully”. She added that “he met his final days with courage, faith, and grace.”
It was Van Der Beek’s grace as an actor that first made him a star, helped by a healthy amount of drive and ambition. While growing up in Connecticut he got his start acting in school plays and was only 15 when he first announced to his mother, a gymnastics teacher named Melinda, that he was ready to go to New York to find an agent. A year later, he made his stage debut in the city in an Edward Albee production at the Signature Theater Company. He was still a student at Connecticut’s Cheshire Academy when, aged 18, he won his first film credit playing a bully in 1995’s Angus alongside George C. Scott and Kathy Bates.
While Dawson’s Creek made him a teen heartthrob, Van Der Beek quickly set about subverting his public image. While the show was still on the air and a significant ratings smash, Van Der Beek busied himself showing his range. He was a high school football player in 1999’s Varsity Blues, while in Kevin Smith’s 2001 Hollywood satire Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back he played himself and bickered entertainingly with his unprepared co-star Jason Biggs: “You wouldn’t last a day on the Creek!”
Best of all was his leading role in the 2002 adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s drug-fueled college novel The Rules of Attraction. Van Der Beek played Sean Bateman, the younger brother of American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman, a promiscuous, jaded student drug dealer concerned solely with satisfying his various appetites. “Ellis’s ice-cold prose is well-served by [director Roger] Avary and his cast,” wrote The Independent’s Anthony Quinn in a contemporaneous review. “If it's a chronicle of monolithic depravity and languid nihilism you want, knock yourself out.”
After Dawson’s Creek concluded, Van Der Beek returned to New York to appear in playwright Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance off-Broadway. He was also a regular guest star on television, appearing in a wide variety of shows including Ugly Betty, Criminal Minds and How I Met Your Mother.
From 2012 to 2013 he continued to prove his willingness to send himself up by playing a vain, self-absorbed version of himself on sitcom Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment 23. On the show, he was constantly beset by Dawson’s Creek fans while desperately trying to revitalize his flagging career. In 2017, he wrote, created and starred in What Would Diplo Do?, delivering an exaggerated version of the superstar DJ.
Best known for playing a hopeless romantic onscreen, in his real life Van Der Beek married twice. His first marriage, to Heather McComb, lasted from 2003 until 2009 and he later commented that he “got married very young.”
He met his second wife, Kimberley Brook, in 2009 during a spiritual trip to Israel. He later recalled that while talking to a friend on the trip he had the “realization” that he needed to find his “soulmate” to start a family. While he was opening up about this, Kimberley interrupted their discussion to ask his friend a question.
“I was annoyed. Who the hell was stepping all over my moment?” he remembered later. Within weeks, the couple were together, and they married a year later in a ceremony in Tel Aviv. They had four daughters and two sons together, and Van Der Beek spoke publicly about the couple’s difficulties with miscarriages. He described fatherhood as “the craziest thing I’ve ever done” and “the thing that’s made me happiest.”
In real life, Van Der Beek found the soulmate he’d been searching for in Kimberly. For those who watched him grow up on screen, he’d already modeled what that kind of love might look like. His fans will carry him with them forever.
