creek

Support for James Van Der Beek’s family continues to pour in. The GoFundMe created to support them following the “Dawson’s Creek” star’s death approached $2.3 million in donations Friday morning.

Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw are among the celebrity donors who have contributed to the fundraiser organized by the late actor’s friends. The couple’s donation is listed as $25,000. Those familiar with Van Der Beek’s breakout role on the millennial teen drama know that Spielberg is Dawson Leery’s favorite director.

Originally airing from 1998 to 2003, “Dawson’s Creek” was a seminal teen drama that followed four friends growing up in a small coastal town as they navigated their dreams, relationships and various coming-of-age milestones. Van Der Beek’s Dawson was an aspiring filmmaker whose dreams were bigger than his small hometown. Along with friends Joey (Katie Holmes), Pacey (Joshua Jackson) and Jen (Michelle Williams), Dawson grappled with very relatable teen dilemmas including heartbreak, betrayal and bad decisions.

The fundraiser, which had more than 44,000 donors as of Friday morning, was organized to help support Van Der Beek’s wife and children, who “are facing an uncertain future” due to the financial strain of the late actor’s medical costs. The late actor died following a battle with colorectal cancer. Funds will be used to “help cover essential living expenses, pay bills, and support the children’s education,” the organizers wrote.

Van Der Beek revealed in 2012 that he had been paid “almost nothing” for his work on “Dawson’s Creek” and had not received any residuals from the hit show.

“There was no residual money,” he told “Today.” “I was 20. It was a bad contract. I saw almost nothing from that.”

Before his death, Van Der Beek auctioned off personal memorabilia and sold collectibles to help pay for his cancer treatments. In September, his “Dawson’s Creek” co-stars helped organize and stage a reunion fundraiser to support Van Der Beek and his family — a reunion the actor had to miss because of a virus. “Black Bird” actor Paul Walter Hauser had also been raising funds through Cameo videos and auctions to help the late actor prior to his death.

Besides Spielberg, celebrity donors to Van Der Beek’s GoFundMe also reportedly include Zoe Saldaña, Jon M. Chu, Derek Hough, Busy Philipps, Jenna Dewan and others.

Van Der Beek’s “Dawson’s Creek” colleagues have also been among the many who have shared tributes to the late actor.

“Several times today, from my heart, I’ve tried to form the words to express the beautiful brilliance of James and what his presence has meant to my life,” “Dawson’s” creator Kevin Williamson wrote Thursday in a post shared on Instagram. “But I am truly at a loss for words. I will have to trust that one day those words will come… But today, all I can think about is Kimberly and the entire Van Der Beek family.”

Holmes, meanwhile, shared a handwritten note addressed to Van Der Beek on Instagram Wednesday. She was the first of “Dawson’s Creek’s” surviving core quartet to publicly acknowledge Van Der Beek’s death.

“Thank you,” Holmes wrote in her note, which was addressed to Van Der Beek. “To share a space with your imagination is sacred — breathing the same air in the land of make believe and trusting that each others’ hearts are safe in their expression.”

In her remembrance, Holmes highlighted their shared “laughter, conversations about life, James Taylor songs” and their “adventures of a unique youth.” She also highlighted Van Der Beek’s “Bravery. Compassion. Selflessness [and] Strength.”

“I mourn this loss with a heart holding the reality of his absence and deep gratitude for his imprint on it,” wrote Holmes, who also sent love to Van Der Beek’s wife and children in her message.

Other members of the extended “Dawson’s Creek” family, including actors Chad Michael Murray, Kerr Smith and Sasha Alexander, have also been among those offering condolences and paying tribute to Van Der Beek and his family online.

“James Van Der Beek was one in a billion and he will be forever missed and i don’t know what else to say,” wrote Busy Philipps in her Instagram tribute. “He was my friend and i loved him and i’m so grateful for our friendship all these years.”

JAMES Van Der Beek made ‘no money’ from his starring role in Dawson’s Creek due to a clause in his contract about reruns of the hit series.

Actor James passed away on Wednesday following a two year battle with colorectal cancer.

Friends then set up a GoFundMe to support his wife Kimberley and their six children, who are said to be at risk of losing their home due to the cost of James’s medical bills.

James shot to fame in 1998 as lead character Dawson Leery in Dawson’s Creek.

Despite the show’s huge popularity – which has continued since it ended in 2003 – he previously confessed he makes no money from reruns or streaming deals.

Speaking to Today in 2012, James explained: “There was no residual money.

“I was 20. It was a bad contract. I saw almost nothing from that.”

Following James’s heartbreaking death, friends were quick to jump into action to support his wife and their children Olivia, 15, Joshua, 13, Annabel, 12, Emilia, 9, Gwendolyn, 7, and Jeremiah, 4.

A GoFundMe page was set up and donations have already surpassed $1 million.

The message on the account reads: “In the wake of this loss, Kimberly and the children are facing an uncertain future. 

“The costs of James’s medical care and the extended fight against cancer have left the family out of funds.

“They are working hard to stay in their home and to ensure the children can continue their education and maintain some stability during this incredibly difficult time. 

“The support of friends, family, and the wider community will make a world of difference as they navigate the road ahead.”

Following his diagnosis with cancer in 2023 James began working with Propstore to sell off his Dawson’s Creek memorabilia in order to cover his medical costs.

When “Dawson’s Creek” premiered on Jan. 20, 1998, I was 11 years old. I had never been in a love triangle or gotten drunk at a house party. Yet, like so many other millennials, I religiously set the VHS player to record “Dawson’s Creek” every week on the WB.

My parents didn’t approve of their impressionable child devouring the semi-debaucherous teen melodrama, so I labeled the VHS tapes “The Brady Bunch,” then routinely snuck out of bed late at night to quietly watch Dawson, Joey, Pacey and Jen navigate their hormonal angst via unbelievably erudite dialogue.

On Wednesday, “Dawson’s Creek” star James Van Der Beek died at 48 after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He left behind six kids, a wife and decades of work across film and television.

But for many millennials, he will always be Dawson Leery.

Van Der Beek’s health was already in decline when I profiled “Dawson’s Creek” creator Kevin Williamson for The Times last year. Still, the actor kindly agreed to answer questions for the piece via email. His commentary went beyond what was expected, graciously detailing his time on the show and praising his co-stars and collaborators.

In the “Dawson’s” audition room, for example, Van Der Beek said his soon-to-be co-star Joshua Jackson “stood out because while other actors nervously went over their sides (myself included), he had the energy of a guy who was ready for a prize fight. I remember thinking, ‘THAT GUY is really interesting. If they cast him as Pacey, this is going to be really good.’”

James Van Der Beek, left, and Joshua Jackson in “Dawson’s Creek,” which would launch them to stardom.

(Fred Norris/The WB)

Van Der Beek likewise effused that, as a showrunner, Williamson “felt like a friend who was excited to go make a movie in his backyard. Even the way he ‘pitched’ storylines — it was never a pitch. It was a campfire story about people he cared about that he’d unfold in such a simple, compelling way that you couldn’t help but care about them too.”

Millennial viewers did care. A lot.

“Dawson’s Creek,” a simple drama about four friends growing up in a small, coastal town, quickly became a defining touchstone of Y2K culture, a major hit for the WB network — the series finale drew more than 7 million viewers — and a star-making machine for its four leads: Van Der Beek, Jackson, Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams.

The floppy-haired, often flannel-clad Van Der Beek wasn’t the show’s breakout heartthrob. (That honorific belonged to Jackson, who played Pacey, Dawson’s charming best friend and Joey’s end-game paramour.)

But as the title character and a partial avatar for Williamson — who had similarly spent his own teen years dreamily pining and aspiring to be a filmmaker — Dawson was the boy-next-door pillar around which the show orbited.

Yes, Dawson was whiny and moody and extremely self-centered, but so are a lot of teenagers. Through Van Der Beek’s wistful performance, viewers were given a window through which to grapple with betrayal, death, heartbreak and a litany of bad decisions.

For better or worse, Dawson served as an emotional, often cautionary, proxy for millennials’ own coming-of-age messiness.

In the years since the series ended in 2003, Dawson has largely been reduced to the “Dawson crying” meme: a Season 3 screenshot of Van Der Beek, face contorted in pain and on the verge of crying messy, heaving tears as Dawson tells Joey she should choose Pacey over him.

The emotional relationship between Joey and Dawson was core to the series.

(Fred Norris/The WB)

Van Der Beek later revealed that the tears weren’t scripted. So attuned had he become to his character’s sensitivity by that point that the emotions flowed naturally.

“I think at the heart of [Williamson’s] projects are characters that he himself cares about deeply — flaws and all,” Van Der Beek said in his email last year. “They’re authentic to their background, sincere according to their world view… and vulnerable.”

Van Der Beek was vulnerable, too. As his cancer progressed, he was open with fans about his health struggles and the early warning signs. He appeared via video at a “Dawson’s Creek” reunion event in New York City last September, the proceeds of which raised money for cancer awareness.

In Van Der Beek’s death, there is no real-world instrumental score or innate montage of his best moments to soften the blow, as would have happened with a character on “Dawson’s Creek” (though the internet will surely be awash in such fan-made edits).

But through his work on “Dawson’s,” a generation can take comfort in a starry-eyed boy on a dock in Capeside who once invited us into his messy, emotional world.

GAUNT and thin after a long cancer battle, the trademark smile still shone through.

Actor James Van Der Beek was supposed to be there as the cast of Dawson’s Creek reunited for the first time in 22 years.

But his illness meant he could only appear in a short video for the assembled fans.

Yet for those there, and around the world, it meant everything.

The 48-year-old actor, who died yesterday after being diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer in 2023, said the emotional reunion, which his wife Kimberly and their six children attended in his place, had been something he had been looking forward to during his gruelling treatment.

He told the audience at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York: “I have been looking forward to this night for months and months ever since my angel Michelle Williams said she was putting it together.

LAST WORDS

James Van Der Beek left heartbreaking final message to fans before shock death

‘COURAGE AND GRACE’

James Van Der Beek statement in full after Dawson’s Creek star dies

“I can’t believe I’m not there. I can’t believe I don’t get to see my cast mates, my beautiful cast in person.

“I wanted to stand on that stage and thank every single person in the theatre for being here tonight.

“From the cast to the crew to everybody who’s doing anything and has been so generous, and especially every single last one of you – you are the best fans in the world.”

Van Der Beek was the all American teenager long before he became the object of teenage desire in adolescent drama Dawson’s Creek.

The son of mobile phone executive James Van Der Beek and former dancer Melinda, he was a promising American footballer in Cheshire, Connecticut.

But a concussion at the age of 13 kept him off the playing field so he took up acting.

He landed the lead role in his school’s production of Grease playing Danny Zuko.

He never looked back.

By the time he was 15 he was begging his mother to get him an agent and they travelled to New York to secure a deal.

While studying at private boarding school The Cheshire Academy he started appearing in Broadway productions.

A brief stint at university in New Jersey quickly fell by the wayside as he started landing major roles and then, at the age of 20, the lead in the teen drama.

As Dawson Leery, a budding filmmaker with an on-off relationship with Joey played by Katie Holmes, he became a teen heart-throb and the spawn of countless memes.

In 122 episodes of the show he grew from a confused 15-year-old to a confused adult.

The show’s theme tune I Don’t Want To Wait followed him throughout his life and triggered memories of the teen frenzy that surrounded him.

He said: “If I was at karaoke and it started playing there’s a part of me – and I’m a f*****g grown-ass man with four kids – that still wants to go hide under the table.

“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.

“When I was first very famous and people were passing out and all that, I remember watching a Beatles documentary and George saying how people were looking for any excuse to go mad.”

Dawson, like James, grew up on the show and when it came to an end he struggled to find work.

His big TV comeback show, NBC medical drama Mercy, was cancelled.

Sitcom Friends With Better Lives, made by the people behind Friends and Frazier, was pulled off air after eight episodes.

“I was 33, I had my first kid, and I thought: OK, what doors are open right now?” he said. “And I was thinking, I’m having more fun doing comedy than I would crying every day!

“I look back and I’m grateful. But it was an exhausting six-year marathon.

“I was shooting movies or doing photo shoots when the show was on hiatus.

“I felt burnt out when it ended. I needed time to duck away and disappear, figure things out and grow up a bit.

“When I was 24 the character I played on TV was a teenager losing his virginity.”

James met the love of his life Kimberly in 2009 and married the following year.

Together they had six children: Olivia, 15, Joshua, 13, Annabel Leah, 11, Emilia, nine, Gwendolyn, seven, and four-year-old Jeremiah, known as Remi.

He said: “When I was younger, I used to define myself as an actor, which was never all that fulfilling, and then I became a husband… it was much better and then I became a father… that was the ultimate.

“It just happened. We had one planned child – one out of six.

“One was 100% on purpose. The one thing we really sucked at was not getting pregnant. But thank God, honestly, because it’s such a struggle for people, and we really don’t take it for granted.

“I joke, and I laugh, but like, yeah, we really just kind of got lucky that way.”

He was always devoted to the show that made him a poster boy to girls around the world.

But, closer to home, he was reluctant at showing it to his own children for one very good reason.

He said: “It’s a great show, I love the show, I think other kids can watch it.

“I don’t think my kids need to watch their dad pretend to go through puberty. That’s my stance on it.

“It was a very well-intentioned show, people really trying to do the right thing and speaking incredibly eloquently about how they were trying to do the right thing.

“I think that seed of good intentions comes through.”

In November 2024, he revealed he had been diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer.

Last March he spoke about his fight with the disease on his 48th birthday, saying it had been the hardest year of his life.

He said: “I had to come nose to nose with death and all those definitions that I cared so deeply about were stripped from me.

“I was away for treatment, so I could no longer be a husband who was helpful to my wife. I could no longer be a father who could pick up his kids and put them to bed and be there for them.

“I could not be a provider because I wasn’t working.”

The reunion with his fellow cast members, in a charity gig for cancer research, was a beacon of hope in his darkest days.

Illness forced him to stay home but his message to fans was clear.

He said: “Everyone please enjoy all the love in that room. Shine some on my family.

“I will be beaming and receiving from afar in a bed in Austin.”

It is painful to have to write about Catherine O’Hara, so alive and lively a presence, in the past tense. O’Hara has lived inside my head — is it too corny to say my heart? — from “SCTV” to “Schitt’s Creek” to “The Studio,” on whose second season she was scheduled to start work, when she died, Friday at 71.

Any appearance constituted a recommendation for — a benediction upon — whatever she was appearing in; you felt she would only say yes to things that used her well, that sounded fun or interesting, and that her casting reflected well on the project and people who cast her. I think of her not as a careerist, but a Canadian. Of joining “Schitt’s Creek,” she said when I interviewed her in 2015, “it took me a few moments to commit, [but] I already trusted [co-creator, co-star] Eugene [Levy] as a writer and an actor, and as a good man who I could stand to spend time with.”

This is how it began for her, in Toronto, where her brother Marcus was dating Gilda Radner, who was in “Godspell” with Levy and Martin Short. “And it was really watching Gilda when I realized, ‘cause I’d always liked acting in school, that it was actually a local possibility. And then she got into Second City theater, and I was a waitress there — it’s like I stalked her — and then she did the show for a while and then took on a job for the National Lampoon. So I got to understudy or take her place — I got to join the cast, and Eugene was in it. It was really just the luck of having a professional actor suddenly in my life.”

As an “SCTV” early adopter, O’Hara was first attractive to me because she was funny, but she was also beautiful — a beauty she could subvert by a subtle or broad rearrangement of her features. Though fundamentally a comic actress, her characters could feel pained or tragic beneath the surface — even Lola Heatherton, one of her signature “SCTV” characters, an over-exuberant spangled entertainer (“I love you! I want to have your babies!” was a catch phrase) is built on desperation. Among many, many other parts, she played a teenaged Brooke Shields singing Devo’s “Whip It!,” Katherine Hepburn, a depressed Ingmar Bergman character, and, most memorably, chirpy teenage quiz show contestant Margaret Meehan, buzzing in with answers before the questions are asked, and growing tearfully undone as the host (Levy) becomes increasingly angry.

Elsewhere, she played a forgetful suburban mom in “Home Alone,” the work for which she’s arguably best known, given its ongoing mainstream popularity; an ice cream truck driver messing with Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours”; and a tasteless art snob and indifferent mother in “Beetlejuice,” where she met her future husband, production designer Bo Welch. She shone in three Christopher Guest movies, paired with Fred Willard in “Waiting for Guffman” as community stars; opposite Levy in “Best in Show,” as a dog handler with a lot of ex-boyfriends; with Levy again in “A Mighty Wind,” as a reuniting ‘60s folk duo; and in “For Your Consideration” as an aging actress dreaming of an Oscar. In the great Netflix miniseries “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (also designed by Welch), she played an evil optometrist, the sometime girlfriend of Neil Patrick Harris’ Count Olaf, dark, cold, sexy. Last year, she picked up a supporting actress Emmy nomination as a dethroned but not knocked down executive in “The Studio”; she’s fierce and funny. And, though she was fundamentally a comic actress, she could play straight, as in the second season of “The Last of Us,” penetrating opposite Pedro Pascal as his therapist, and the widow of a man he killed.

Lived in across six, ever-richer seasons of “Schitt’s Creek,” Moira Rose is certainly her crowning achievement, a completely original, Emmy-winning creation whose quirks and complexities were embraced by a wide audience; going forth, she’ll be a reference to describe other characters — a “Moira Rose type” — with no explanation needed. With her original, breathy way of speaking, stressing odd syllables and stretching random vowels to the breaking point, her mad fashions and family of wigs, Moira is a sketch character with depth. Of all the Roses, she’s the one most resistant to adapting to their motel world, to coming down off the mountain, but she is as needy as she is condescending, and underlying her fantastic, tightly structured carapace is a fear that’s terribly moving when it shows through the cracks.

Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in scene from “Schitt’s Creek.” The actors worked together frequently over the years.

(PopTV)

“I like to think she’s really threatened by this small-town life — because she’s been there, you know?” O’Hara said back when the series began. “That just makes it more threatening in my mind. And I like to think of her as more vulnerable than just snobby or superior. I think it’s way more insecure.”

Her tentative acceptance of her circumstance, as well as the show’s overarching arc, finds expression in the series finale, where, all white and gold, in flowing robes with long blonde locks cascading from beneath a bishop’s hat, she tearfully conducts the marriage of her son, David (co-creator Dan Levy). Speaking of a sort of wind of fate, she says, “All we can wish for our families, for those we love, is that that wind will eventually place us on solid ground. and I believe it’s done just that for my family in this little town, in the middle of nowhere.” You might cry, too.

I had the luck to speak with O’Hara several times over the run of the series. The last was in Canada, a day or two before the last day of filming. We sat on the apron of the Rosebud Motel, looking across the muddy parking lot to where fans were gathered on the road above.

“They’re there as much for each other as for us. It’s almost that we don’t have to be there, but we brought them together somehow.” That’s what actors and the stories they tell, give us — the joy, and sometimes the pain: A world of strangers, united in this awful moment, out of love for Catherine O’Hara.