CAGNEY, JAMES

Born in New York City, James Cagney (July 17, 1899–March 30, 1986) was the son of an Irish bartender and his Norwegian wife. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, Jimmy Cagney attended Columbia University. His show business career began in 1918 when he appeared in local vaudeville revues. This work led to his first role in a major Broadway show Pitter Patter in 1920. After an unsuccessful visit to Hollywood in 1922, Cagney danced with his wife, Frances Willard "Billie" Vernon, on the vaudeville circuit in New York. Cagney won critical notice for small stage roles and by 1929 he was a star on Broadway.

Cagney's movie career began with the Warner Brothers musical Sinner's Holiday (1930). The cocky redhead from the Lower East Side and Yorkville neighborhoods quickly became a movie star in the 1930s, often playing a fast-talking Irish-American tough guy. His roles in Public Enemy (1931) and Smart Money (1931) helped establish the gangster movie genre. Cagney was handsome, athletic, and versatile; his experience as a dancer was evident in his unique body movement and dynamic screen presence. But his ironic wit and comic talent led to a wide variety of roles, including those in Blonde Crazy (1931) and Taxi (1932).

Discontented with the Hollywood studio system, the independent New Yorker left Los Angeles for six months while renegotiating his contract in 1931. With his salary doubled, Cagney was one of the first Irish-American actors to achieve megastar status playing urban antiheroes. He had leading roles in nineteen films in the next four years. Depression-era audiences were charmed by the feisty big city wise guy in such hit movies as Winner Take All (1932), Hard to Handle (1933), Lady Killer (1933), and Jimmy the Gent (1934). His performance in Footlight Parade (1933) was among his most memorable. In this movie he played a light-footed Broadway stage director confronting the competition of talking motion pictures. Cagney danced and sang in three Busby Berkeley production numbers and was featured in the film's tribute to the National Recovery Administration, reminding Depression-weary viewers how much they depended on President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its lavish budget and strong supporting cast distinguished Footlight Parade from most of the Hollywood dream factory movies Cagney made in the 1930s.

Cagney's performance in Comes the Navy (1934) helped that picture earn an Academy Award nomination for best picture, but many of his movies in the 1930s were less memorable. When Cagney teamed with his friend Pat O'Brien in nine movies, however, the Irish-American pair delighted audiences with their wit and energy. The restless Cagney left Warner Brothers in 1935 to work with independent film companies but returned to earn his first nomination as best actor in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Among the best roles he played in the 1930s was his part as a Prohibition racketeer in The Roaring Twenties (1939).

While Cagney was often described as cocky or pugnacious, his movie star qualities were more difficult to define. Perfectly suited for the hard times of the thirties, he possessed a gritty character with clipped speech and restless body language that moviegoers found irresistible. His political consciousness, as a founder of the Screen Actors Guild, his criticism of Jack Warner's studio system, and his being a subject of a HUAC investigation in the late 1930s and 1940s, also suited the times.

James Cagney made more than ninety movies in his long and productive career, but he is best remembered for his tough guy roles in the fifty movies he made from 1930 to 1940. He retired to Martha's Vineyard in 1961 and received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1974. He died on March 30, 1986, at his farm in Stanfordville, New York.

CAGNEY, JAMES

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