James Cagney biography

Synopsis

Profile

Cagney, the son of an Irish bartender, grew up in the rough Lower East Side of New York City. He toured in vaudeville as a song-and-dance man with his wife, Frances, in the 1920s and scored his first major success opposite Joan Blondell in the Broadway musical Penny Arcade (1929). He made his film debut in the movie adaptation of the play, entitled Sinner's Holiday (1930), and his well-received performance resulted in a contract with Warner Bros. studios. After taking on a few supporting roles, Cagney became a star with his chilling portrayal of gangster Tom Powers in William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931). Thereafter he was usually typecast as a sneering, explosive “tough guy” in several films, but he occasionally worked in musicals—he demonstrated considerable skill as a dancer in Footlight Parade (1933)—and he even had a Shakesperian role, as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). He was on the right side of the law in the popular G' Men (1935), whereas such films as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938, Oscar nomination for best actor), Each Dawn I Die (1939), and The Roaring Twenties (1939) featured Cagney in increasingly complex studies of criminal pathology. Cagney's repertoire during this period also included westerns (The Oklahoma Kid, 1939), comedies (The Bride Came C.O.D., 1941), and melodramas (The Strawberry Blonde, 1941).

Cagney's uniqueness as an actor lay in his ability to convey emotional extremes in a manner that was both broad and natural. He exuded a tremendous energy that rendered any character larger-than-life, yet his innate grasp of the subtleties of the script ensured that his performances were multidimensional and credible. Although he eschewed an internal “method” approach to acting, his perennially pugnacious screen persona was a natural extension of his real-life character, formed in part during his pugilistic youth among Irish street gangs. Cagney's philosophy of acting, revealed in his autobiography, Cagney by Cagney (1975), was simple, direct, and sagacious: “Plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth.”

Although specializing in charismatic criminals for much of his career, Cagney's best-known role is that of the legendary Broadway song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Exhibiting the same brash charm in his dancing style