James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899 – March 30, 1986) was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing tough guys. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its 50 Greatest American Screen Legends.

In his first professional acting performance, he danced dressed as a woman in the chorus line of the 1919 revue Every Sailor. He spent several years in vaudeville as a hoofer and comedian, until he got his first major acting part in 1925. He secured several other roles, receiving good notices, before landing the lead in the 1929 play Penny Arcade. After rave reviews, Warner Bros. signed him for an initial $500-a-week, three-week contract to reprise his role; this was quickly extended to a seven-year contract.

Cagney's seventh film, The Public Enemy, became one of the most influential gangster movies of the period. Notable for its famous grapefruit scene, the film thrust Cagney into the spotlight, making him one of Warners' and Hollywood's biggest stars. In 1938, he received his first Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for Angels with Dirty Faces, before winning in 1942 for his portrayal of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. He was nominated a third time in 1955 for Love Me or Leave Me. Cagney retired for twenty years in 1961, spending time on his farm, before returning for a part in Ragtime, mainly to aid his recovery from a stroke. Cagney walked out on Warners several times over the course of his career, each time coming back on better personal and artistic terms. In 1935, he sued Warners for breach of contract and won; this marked one of the first times an actor had beaten a studio over a contract issue. He worked for an independent film company for a year while the suit was being settled, and also established his own production company, Cagney Productions, in 1942, before returning to Warners again four years later. Jack Warner called him "The Professional Againster", in reference to Cagney’s refusal to be pushed around. Cagney also made numerous morale-boosting troop tours before and during World War II, and was president of the Screen Actors Guild for two years.

Early life

Cagney was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. His biographers disagree as to the actual location: either on the corner of Avenue D and 8th Street or in a top floor apartment at 391 East Eighth. His father, James Francis Cagney, Sr., was of Irish descent. By the time of his son's birth, he was a bartender and amateur boxer, though on Cagney's birth certificate, he is listed as a telegraphist. His mother was Carolyn (née Nelson); her father was a Norwegian ship captain while her mother was Irish.

Cagney was the second of seven children, two of whom died within months of birth; he himself was very sick as a young child, so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty in which they grew up. The family moved twice while he was still young, first to East 79th Street, and then to East 96th Street.

The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art. He also took German and joined the Student Army Training Corps, but dropped out after one semester, returning home upon the death of his father during the 1918 flu pandemic.

He held a variety of jobs early in his life, giving all his earnings to his family: junior architect, copy boy for the New York Sun, book custodian at the New York Public Library, bellhop,draughtsman, and night doorman. Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, "It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him."

He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that would eventually contribute to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed "Cellar-Door Cagney" after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors.

He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, against all comers when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for theNew York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it.[18] He also played semi-professional baseball for a local team, and entertained dreams of playing in the Major Leagues.

His introduction to films was unusual; when visiting an aunt in Brooklyn who lived opposite Vitagraph Studios, Cagney would climb over the fence to watch the filming of John Bunnymovies. He became involved in amateur dramatics, starting as a scenery boy for a Chinese pantomime at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, one of the first settlement houses in the nation, where his brother Harry performed. He was initially content working behind the scenes and had no interest in performing. One night, however, Harry became ill, and although Cagney was not an understudy, his photographic memory of rehearsals enabled him to stand in for his brother without making a single mistake.

Afterward, he joined a number of companies as a performer in a variety of roles.

Early career (1919–1930)

While working at Wanamaker's Department Store in 1919, Cagney learned, from a colleague who had seen him dance, of a role in the upcoming production Every Sailor. A wartime play in which the chorus was made up of servicemen dressed as women, it was originally titled Every Woman. Cagney auditioned for the role of a chorus girl, despite considering it a waste of time; he only knew one dance step, the complicated Peabody, but he knew it perfectly. This was enough to convince the producers that he could dance, and he copied the other dancers' moves while waiting to go on. He did not find it odd to play a woman, nor was he embarrassed. He later recalled how he was able to shed his own natural shy persona when he stepped onto the stage: "For there I am not myself. I am not that fellow, Jim Cagney, at all. I certainly lost all consciousness of him when I put on skirts, wig, paint, powder, feathers and spangles."

Had Cagney's mother had her way, his stage career would have ended when he quit Every Sailor after two months; proud as she was of his performance, she preferred that he get an education. Cagney appreciated the $35 a week he was paid, which he called "a mountain of money for me in those worrisome days." In deference to his mother's worries, he got employment as a brokerage house runner. This did not stop him looking for more stage work, however, and he went on to successfully audition for a chorus part in Pitter Patter, for which he earned $55 a week—he sent $40 to his mother each week. So strong was his habit of holding down more than one job at a time, he also worked as a dresser for one of the leads, portered the casts' luggage, and understudied for the lead. Among the chorus line performers was sixteen-year-old Frances Willard "Billie" Vernon, whom he would marry in 1922. The show began Cagney's ten-year association with vaudeville and Broadway. Cagney and his wife were among the early resident of Free Acres, a social experiment established by Bolton Hall in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.

Pitter Patter was not hugely successful, but it did well enough to run for 32 weeks, enabling Cagney to join the vaudeville circuit. He and Vernon toured separately with a number of different troupes, reuniting as "Vernon and Nye" to do simple comedy routines and musical numbers. "Nye" was a rearrangement of the last syllable of Cagney's surname. One of the troupes that Cagney joined was Parker, Rand and Leach, taking over the spot vacated when Archie Leach—who would later change his name to Cary Grant—left.

After years of touring and struggling to make money, Cagney and Vernon moved to Hawthorne, California in 1924, partly for Cagney to meet his new mother-in-law, who had just moved there from Chicago, and partly to investigate breaking into the movies. Their train fares were paid for by a friend, the press officer of Pitter Patter, who was also desperate to act. They were not very successful at first; the dance studio Cagney set up had few clients and folded, and he and Vernon toured the studios, but garnered no interest. Eventually, they borrowed some money and headed back to New York via Chicago and Milwaukee, enduring failure along the way when they attempted to make money on the stage.

Cagney secured his first significant non-dancing role in 1925. He played a young tough guy in the three-act play Outside Looking In by Maxwell Anderson, earning $200 a week. As with Pitter Patter, Cagney went to the audition with little confidence of getting the part; he had had no experience with drama at this point. Cagney felt that he only got the role because his hair was redder than that of Alan Bunce, the only other red-headed performer in New York. Both the play and Cagney received good reviews; Life magazine wrote, "Mr. Cagney, in a less spectacular role [than his co-star] makes a few minutes silence during his mock-trial scene something that many a more established actor might watch with profit". Burns Mantle wrote that it "contained the most honest acting now to be seen in New York".

Following the show's four-month run, Cagney went back to vaudeville for the next couple of years. He achieved varied success, but after appearing in Outside Looking In, the Cagneys were more financially secure. During this period, he met George M. Cohan, whom he would go on to portray in Yankee Doodle Dandy, though they never spoke.

Cagney secured the lead role in the 1926–27 season West End production of Broadway by George Abbott. The show's management insisted that he copy Broadway lead Lee Tracy's performance, despite Cagney's discomfort in doing so, but the day before the show sailed for England, they decided to replace him. This was a devastating turn of events for Cagney; apart from the logistical difficulties this presented—the couple's luggage was in the hold of the ship and they had given up their apartment—he almost quit show business. As Billie recalled, "Jimmy said that it was all over. He made up his mind that he would get a job doing something else."

The Cagneys had run-of-the-play contracts, which lasted as long as the play did. Billie was in the chorus line of the show, and with help from the Actors’ Equity Association, Cagney understudied Tracy on the Broadway show, providing them with a desperately needed steady income. Cagney also established a dance school for professionals, then landed a part in the play Women Go On Forever, directed by John Cromwell, which ran for four months. By the end of the run, Cagney was exhausted from acting and running the dance school.

He had built a reputation as an innovative teacher, so when he was cast as the lead in Grand Street Follies of 1928, he was also appointed the choreographer. The show received rave reviews and was followed by Grand Street Follies of 1929. These roles led to a part in George Kelly's Maggie the Magnificent, a play generally not liked by the critics, although Cagney's performance was. Cagney saw this role (and Women Go on Forever) as significant because of the talented directors he encountered; he learned "what a director was for and what a director could do. They were directors who could play all the parts in the play better than the actors cast for them."

Later career (1955–1961)

Cagney worked with MGM on the Western film Tribute to a Bad Man, a role that had originally been written for Spencer Tracy. He received praise for his performance, and the studio liked his work enough to offer him These Wilder Years with Barbara Stanwyck. The two stars got on well; they had both previously worked in vaudeville, and they entertained the cast and crew off-screen by singing and dancing.

In 1956, Cagney undertook one of his very rare television roles, starring in Robert Montgomery's Soldiers From the War Returning. This was a favor to Montgomery, who needed a strong fall season opener to stop the network from dropping his series. Cagney's appearance ensured that it was a success. The actor made it clear to reporters afterwards that television was not his medium: "I do enough work in movies. This is a high-tension business. I have tremendous admiration for the people who go through this sort of thing every week, but it's not for me."

The following year, Cagney appeared in Man of a Thousand Faces, in which he played Lon Chaney. He received excellent reviews, with the New York Journal American rating it one of his best performances, and the film, made for Universal, was a box office hit. Cagney's skill at mimicry, combined with a physical similarity to Chaney, helped him generate empathy for his character.[139][140]

Later in 1957, Cagney ventured behind the camera for the first and only time to direct Short Cut to Hell, a remake of the 1941 Alan Ladd film This Gun for Hire, which in turn was based on the Graham Greene novel A Gun for Sale. Cagney had long been told by friends that he would make an excellent director,[140] so when he was approached by his friend, producer A. C. Lyles, he instinctively said yes. He refused all offers of payment, saying he was an actor, not a director. The film was low budget, and shot quickly. As Cagney recalled, "We shot it in twenty days, and that was long enough for me. I find directing a bore, I have no desire to tell other people their business".

In 1959, Cagney played a labor leader in what proved to be his final musical, Never Steal Anything Small, which featured a comical song and dance duet with Cara Williams, who played his girlfriend.

For Cagney's next film, he traveled to Ireland for Shake Hands with the Devil, directed by Michael Anderson. Cagney had hoped to spend some time tracing his Irish ancestry, but time constraints and poor weather meant that he was unable to do so. The overriding message of violence inevitably leading to more violence attracted Cagney to the role of an Irish Republican Army commander, and resulted in what some critics would regard as the finest performance of his final years.

Cagney's career began winding down, and he made only one film in 1960, the critically acclaimed The Gallant Hours, in which he played Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey. The film, although set during the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Pacific Theater during World War II, was not a war film, but instead focused on the impact of command. Cagney Productions, which shared the production credit with Robert Montgomery's company, made a brief return, though in name only. The film was a success, and The New York Times' Bosley Crowther singled its star out for praise: "It is Mr. Cagney's performance, controlled to the last detail, that gives life and strong, heroic stature to the principal figure in the film. There is no braggadocio in it, no straining for bold or sharp effects. It is one of the quietest, most reflective, subtlest jobs that Mr. Cagney has ever done.

Retirement and death (1961–1986)

Cagney remained in retirement for twenty years, conjuring up images of Jack Warner every time he was tempted to return, which soon dispelled the notion. After he had turned down an offer to play Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady, he found it easier to rebuff others, including a part in The Godfather Part II. He made few public appearances, preferring to spend winters in Los Angeles, and summers either at his Martha's Vineyard farm or at Verney Farms in New York. When in New York, he and Billie held numerous parties at the Silver Horn restaurant, where they got to know Marge Zimmerman, the proprietress.

Cagney was diagnosed with glaucoma and began taking eye drops, but he continued to have problems with his vision. On Zimmerman's recommendation, he visited a different doctor, who determined that glaucoma had been a misdiagnosis, and that Cagney was actually diabetic. Zimmerman then took it upon herself to look after Cagney, preparing his meals to reduce his blood triglyceride level, which had reached alarming proportions. Such was her success that, by the time Cagney made a rare public appearance at his AFI Lifetime Achievement award ceremony in 1974, he had lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg) and his vision had markedly improved.

Opened by Charlton Heston and introduced by Frank Sinatra, the ceremony was attended by so many Hollywood stars—said to be more than for any event in history—that one columnist wrote at the time that a bomb in the dining room would have brought about the end of the movie industry. During his acceptance speech, Cagney lightly chastised impressionist Frank Gorshin, saying, "Oh, Frankie, just in passing, I never said 'MMMMmmmm, you dirty rat!' What I actually did say was 'Judy, Judy, Judy!'", a joking reference to a famous misquotation attributed to Cary Grant.

"I think he's some kind of genius. His instinct, it's just unbelievable. I could just stay at home. One of the qualities of a brilliant actor is that things look better on the screen than the set. Jimmy has that quality"

Director Miloš Forman

While at Coldwater Canyon in 1977, Cagney had a minor stroke. After two weeks in hospital, Zimmerman became his full-time caregiver, traveling with him and Billie wherever they went. After the stroke, Cagney was no longer able to undertake many of his favorite pastimes, including horse riding and dancing, and as he became more depressed, he even gave up his beloved painting. Encouraged by his wife and Zimmerman, Cagney accepted an offer from Miloš Forman to star in a small but pivotal role in the 1981 film Ragtime.

The film was shot mainly at Shepperton Studios in London, and on his arrival at Southampton aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, Cagney was mobbed by hundreds of fans. Cunard officials, who were responsible for the security at the dock, said they had never seen anything like it, although they had experienced past visits by Marlon Brando and Robert Redford.

Despite its being his first film in twenty years, Cagney was immediately at ease. Flubbed lines and miscues were all committed by his co-stars, many of whom were in awe of Cagney.Howard Rollins, who received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, said, "I was frightened to meet Mr. Cagney. I asked him how to die in front of the camera. He said 'Just die!' It worked. Who would know more about dying than him?" Cagney also repeated the advice he had given to Pamela Tiffin, Joan Leslie and Lemmon. As filming progressed, Cagney's sciatica worsened, but he finished the nine-week shoot, and reportedly stayed on the set after completing his scenes to help other actors with their dialogue.

He and co-star Pat O'Brien appeared on the Parkinson talk show, and Cagney made a surprise appearance at the Queen Mother's command birthday performance at the London Palladium. His appearance on stage prompted the Queen Mother to rise to her feet, the only time she did so during the whole show, and she later broke protocol to go backstage to speak with Cagney directly.

Cagney made a rare TV appearance in the lead role of the movie Terrible Joe Moran in 1984, his last work. He was in fragile health and confined to a wheelchair from strokes, but the producers worked his real-life disabilities into it by casting him as an 80-year old ex-boxer who needs a wheelchair to get around. The film used fight clips from Cagney's 1932 boxing movie Winner Take All, although Cagney plays a different character in the TV-movie.

Cagney died at his Dutchess County farm in Stanfordville, New York, on Easter Sunday 1986, of a heart attack. He is interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. His pallbearers included boxer Floyd Patterson, Mikhail Baryshnikov (who had hoped to play Cagney on Broadway), actor Ralph Bellamy, and Miloš Forman. His close friend, President Ronald Reagan, gave the eulogy at the funeral, which was held at Manhattan's St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church.

Personal life

On September 28, 1922, Cagney married dancer Frances Willard "Billie" Vernon, with whom he remained for the rest of his life. They had met on the chorus line of Pitter Patter. They adopted a son, James Cagney, Jr., in 1941, and then a daughter, Cathleen "Casey" Cagney. Cagney was a very private man, and while he was more than willing to give the press opportunities for photographs when necessary, he generally spent his private time out of the public eye.

Cagney's son married Jill Lisbeth Inness in 1962. The couple had two children, James III and Cindy. Cagney Jr. died from a heart attack on January 27, 1984 in Washington, D.C., two years before his adoptive father's death. He had become estranged from his father and had not seen or talked to him since 1982.

Cagney's daughter Cathleen married Jack W. Thomas in 1962. She too was estranged from her father during the final years of his life. She died August 11, 2004.

As a young man, Cagney became interested in farming – sparked by a soil conservation lecture he had attended – and during his first walkout from Warners, he found a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in Martha's Vineyard; owning a farm had long been a dream of his. Cagney loved that there were no concrete roads surrounding the property, only dirt tracks. The house was rather run-down and ramshackle, and Billie was initially reluctant to move in, but soon came to love the place as well. After being inundated by movie fans, Cagney sent out a rumor that he had hired a gunman for security. The ruse proved so successful that when Spencer Tracy came to visit, his taxi driver refused to drive up to the house, saying, "I hear they shoot!", which forced Tracy to walk the rest of the way.

In 1955, having shot three films, Cagney bought a 120-acre (0.49 km2) farm in Stanfordville, Dutchess County, New York, for $100,000. Cagney named it Verney Farm, taking the first syllable from Billie's maiden name and the second from his own surname. Cagney did not just live there, he turned it into a working farm by selling some of the dairy cattle and replacing them with beef cattle. He expanded it over the years to 750 acres (3.0 km2). Such was Cagney's enthusiasm for farming that when he was awarded an honorary degree fromRollins College, he surprised the staff by writing a paper on soil conservation, rather than just "turning up with Ava Gardner on my arm," as he put it.

Cagney loved horses from childhood, when he would sit on the horses of local delivery riders and ride in horse-drawn streetcars with his mother. He raised horses on his farms, specializing in Morgans, a breed of which he was particularly fond.

Cagney was a keen sailor and owned boats on both coasts of the United States, although he occasionally experienced seasickness—sometimes not being stricken in a heavy sea, but becoming ill on a calm day. He also enjoyed painting, and claimed in his autobiography that he might have been happier as a painter than a movie star, if somewhat poorer. One of his teachers in later life was Sergei Bongart, who went on to own two of Cagney's paintings. Cagney refused to sell his paintings, considering himself an amateur. He signed and sold only one painting, which Johnny Carson bought to benefit a charity.

Honors and legacy

In 1974, Cagney received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Charlton Heston, in announcing that Cagney was to be honored, called him "one of the most significant figures of a generation when American film was dominant, Cagney, that most American of actors, somehow communicated eloquently to audiences all over the world …and to actors as well."

He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980. In 1984, Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Cagney was among Stanley Kubrick and Marlon Brando's favorite actors, and was considered by Orson Welles to be "maybe the greatest actor to ever appear in front of a camera." Warner Bros. would arrange private screenings of Cagney films for Winston Churchill.