Born March 8th, 1977
Died February 11th, 2026
James Van Der Beek, the golden-haired actor who starred as a coastal-town teenager facing the onslaught of first love and first sex in Dawson’s Creek, a popular turn-of-the-millennium TV drama series, died on Wednesday. He was 48.
The death was announced in an Instagram post from his official account. Van Der Beek revealed that he had colorectal cancer in November 2024.
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When Dawson’s Creek began, in 1998, Van Der Beek was its 15-year-old protagonist, Dawson Leery, a wide-eyed, fresh-faced high school sophomore and seemingly perennial virgin. An aspiring film-maker, Dawson was too sensitive, vulnerable and self-involved for his own good – and like all of the show’s unflappable teenage characters, he was articulate beyond his years.
“Why is my mere presence suddenly a detriment to your happiness?” he asked one boy in Season 2. He knew, he said, the “unyielding, merciless torture” of unrequited love. To his best male friend, he gave impossibly mature relationship advice: “The only thing you can really do is make sure that the time she spends with you is as stress-free as possible.”
Kevin Williamson, the series creator, admitted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that the young characters in the show were “a little stylised in the way they talk,” but with good reason. “It was all about the behaviour, what they’re trying to say.”
Caryn James, reviewing the show in The New York Times on its debut, on the WB network, praised the characters’ “sophisticated awareness.” Some critics were offended by the show’s frank treatment of sexuality, however, and at least one major corporation, Procter & Gamble, changed its mind about being a co-producer, much less a sponsor.
WB, only three years old at the time, was catapulted to success by the show’s enormous popularity, particularly among its teenage demographic. When the series ended, six seasons later, Dawson – in a case of art imitating life – was a successful, sexually confident college dropout with his own hit TV series. Van Der Beek was all of 26.
Later, he found himself reflecting on the little indignities that accompanied all that fame.
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Asked in 2023 what advice he would give his younger self, he said on Good Morning America, choosing to be philosophical: “Don’t be surprised if six years of work gets reduced to a three-second GIF of you crying,” adding, “It’s all good.”
James David Van Der Beek was born on March 8th, 1977, in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was the eldest of three children of Melinda (Weber) Van Der Beek, a dancer and gymnastics teacher, and James William Van Der Beek, a telephone company executive.
James, who acted in school productions, was 15 when he asked his mother to drive him into New York City to find an agent.
A year or so later, he made his New York stage debut in Sand, an evening of three one-act Edward Albee plays directed by Albee and presented by the Signature Theatre Company. David Richards, the New York Times’ chief theatre critic at the time, found the young actor “refreshingly un-self-conscious.”
Van Der Beek made his film debut as a high school bully in Angus (1995) while still attending high school at Cheshire Academy.
In 1997, he was studying English at Drew University, in New Jersey, when he played a disturbed teenager under the care of an equally disturbed psychiatrist in Nicky Silver’s off-Broadway comedy My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine. He dropped out of college that year when Dawson’s Creek came along.
While the series was on the air, he played a high school football player in the coming-of-age movie Varsity Blues (1999); himself in the Kevin Smith comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001); and a bitter, promiscuous, drug-dealing college student in The Rules of Attraction (2002), a dark comedy based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
After Dawson’s Creek ended, Van Der Beek was in prime-time demand – as a womanising doctor on NBC’s Mercy (2010); a smart-aleck doctor on Friends With Better Lives (2014); an FBI field agent on the spin-off CSI: Cyber (2015-16); a superstar DJ in What Would Diplo Do? (2017); and a cocaine-snorting bad guy in the first season of Ryan Murphy’s Pose (2018). In all 26 episodes of Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 (2012-13), he played a version of James Van Der Beek plagued by even more Dawson’s Creek fans than in real life.
He also garnered film roles, including co-starring in Backwards (2012), a romance centred on an Olympic rower played by Sarah Megan Thomas.
His final screen appearance was in the movie Sidelined 2: Intercepted, a 2025 sequel to Sidelined: The QB and Me (2024), a sports romance comedy.
His final stage appearance, in 2013, was in The Gift at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, about married couples at a Caribbean resort.
Van Der Beek married Heather McComb, an actress, in 2003. Their divorce became final in 2010, shortly before he married Kimberly Brook, a business consultant with whom he had six children. Survivors include his wife and their children: Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.
Van Der Beek spoke about his acting career in a 2013 interview, saying that he had learned early on to “go in and be completely open and just jump in with both feet.”
He added, “Everything you do belongs to the audience, ultimately.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
[ ‘We would fight to the death for Dawson. He was a sap, but he was our sap’Opens in new window ]
