James Van Der Beek, the Dawson’s Creek star who enraptured a generation of young women as the titular character on the ’90s teen drama, died on Wednesday after a three-year long battle with stage 3 colorectal cancer. He was 48.
Van Der Beek’s wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, announced the news on Instagram. “Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning,” Kimberly wrote. “He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace. There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come. For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and friend.”
In 2023, the actor revealed he had been diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer. In the time since, Van Der Beek spoke publicly about his health battle and how it caused him to reevaluate his personal life with wife Kimberley and their six children: Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn, and Jeremiah, who range from ages 15 to four.
“It has been the hardest year of my life,” Van Der Beek said in a March 2025 video on Instagram to celebrate his 48th birthday. “When I was younger I used to define myself as an actor, which was never really all that fulfilling. Then I became a husband, and that was much better. And then I became a father, and that was the ultimate. I could define myself as a loving, capable, strong, supportive husband and father and provider…then this year I had to look my own mortality in the eye. I had to come nose to nose with death, and all of those definitions I cared so deeply about were stripped from me.”
Unable to physically provide for his wife and children, he said he had to come to a different conclusion about himself: “I am worthy of God’s love, simply because I exist.” He acknowledged that the spirituality of the comment might turn some people off, so he shared a censored version of his hard-fought wisdom with his followers: “You are worthy of love. Because you are.”
A Connecticut native who discovered acting as a teenager, Van Der Beek was cast as Dawson Leery, the introspective high-school student ensnared in six seasons’ worth of love triangles, at the age of 20. The shift from unknown to heartthrob happened practically overnight, with women and teenagers mobbing him at malls just two weeks after he signed his first autograph. In the decades that followed, Van Der Beek spoke about his difficulty processing the sudden onslaught of attention.
“My reaction to fame was to run away from it,” the actor told ABC in 2020. “I didn’t know what to do with recognizability.”
Even the show’s theme song—Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait”—seemed to have traumatized him. “If I was at karaoke and it started playing there’s a part of me—and I’m a fucking grown-ass man with four kids—that still wants to go hide under the table,” Van Der Beek told The Guardian in 2017. “I was at a pharmacy in Philadelphia and it came on and I immediately went into a weird panic. I think it’s tied to the pandemonium that accompanied that, for which there was no off button. Walking around at that time was very tricky because one autograph could turn into a mob scene. So I walked around…in fear of teenage girls.”
Dawson’s Creek, which debuted on the now-extinct channel WB and aired weekly before the deluge of streaming options, hit a cultural nerve with a generation of millennials. “I think if people want a perfect snapshot of what it was like to come of age in the ’90s and be a young person in that moment, Dawson’s will always be a time capsule of that,” said Greg Berlanti, a former showrunner, in a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly.
After Dawson’s Creek ended in 2003, Van Der Beek had trouble shedding the character that Fatherly once called “the patron saint of pouty boys.” Before that, the actor took his charms to the big screen, starring in the 1999 coming-of-age drama Varsity Blues. While filming the movie, Van Der Beek said he asked his costar Jon Voight how he dealt with the constant attention and autograph seeking. “He said, ‘You have such a gift, and that is the gift of being able to make somebody very happy by doing something very simple. All you have to do is sign that paper, give them a little bit of time, look at them, talk to them, and you’ll make them happy. What a gift that is.’ And that made it click for me.”
Roger Avery, who directed Van Der Beek in 2002’s The Rules of Attraction, spoke about what made the then-twentysomething actor so special: “He has something that a lot of the other actors didn’t have, a built-in likeability, kind of a puppy dog charisma.”
Van Der Beek reinvented his career in the 2010s by ironically leaning into the character he couldn’t shake. After a clip of Dawson “ugly crying” on the show went viral, the actor recreated it for a Funny or Die video and starred as an exaggerated version of himself on the TV comedy Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23. “It turns out that James Van Der Beek is funny,” wrote the New York Times in 2017.
“The fun of having a set of expectations is subverting them,” he told the outlet. He had tried to escape the character, to no avail. “So part of the meta thing was just running toward it and playing with it.”
Van Der Beek collected a diverse resume, dabbling in crime procedurals (Law & Order, Criminal Minds, CSI: Cyber), reality competition series (Dancing with the Stars, where he was a semifinalist), and the Ryan Murphy-verse (Pose). Two years ago, the same year he was diagnosed with cancer, Van Der Beek began coming around to the idea of his Dawson’s Creek fame. It seemed that the public’s affection—which had seemed so overwhelming in his younger years—was a welcome source of support.
“The truth is I didn’t know what to do with fame for the longest [time]… because it took me a while to realize it wasn’t actually about me,” Van Der Beek wrote on Instagram to celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary. “While I used to feel like it created a weird separation from people…now I feel like it connects me in a way I really appreciate.”
In September, Van Der Beek was forced to sit out a much-anticipated reunion of Dawson’s Creek because of health issues. The event, held in New York’s Richard Rogers Theater, was organized by his series costar Michelle Williams as a tribute to him and a benefit to cancer awareness. Costars Williams, Katie Holmes, and Joshua Jackson recreated the pilot episode of the series—with Lin Manuel-Miranda filling in as Dawson.
“Despite every effort, I won’t get to be there,” a frail-looking Van Der Beek told audience members during a pretaped message. “I won’t get to stand on that stage and thank every soul in the theater for showing up for me, and against cancer, when I needed it most.”
His wife and six children appeared at the event in his place—with two of his daughters helping sing the show’s theme song onstage. In a social media post afterwards, Holmes wrote, “James, you got this. We got you. To everyone who supported us from the beginning and who continue to support James and his beautiful family, we thank you.”
Van Der Beek, meanwhile, had ended his Instagram post about the Dawson’s Creek’s 25th anniversary by writing: “Thank you to everyone I’ve encountered as a result of this strange, wild, rocket ship ride.”
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