Gary Cooper was an American film actor. He is known for his natural, authentic, and understated acting style and screen performances.
Background
Gary Cooper was born on May 7, 1901, in Helena, Montana to Alice (née Brazier) and Charles Henry Cooper. His father had emigrated from Houghton Regis, Bedfordshire and was a prominent lawyer, rancher, and (later) a Montana Supreme Court justice. His mother had emigrated from Gillingham, Kent and married Charles in Montana.
In 1906, Charles purchased the 600-acre (240 ha) Seven-Bar-Nine cattle ranch about fifty miles (eighty kilometers) north of Helena near the town of Craig on the Missouri River. Frank and his older brother Arthur spent their summers there and learned to ride horses, hunt, and fish.
When Cooper was fifteen his hip was injured in a car accident. On his doctor's recommendation he returned to the Seven-Bar-Nine ranch to recuperate by horseback riding. The misguided therapy left him with his characteristic stiff, off-balanced walk and slightly angled riding style.
Education
Cooper attended Central Grade School in Helena. Alice Cooper wanted her sons to have an English education, so in 1909 she took them to England to enroll them in Dunstable Grammar School in Bedfordshire. While there Cooper and his brother lived with their father's cousins, William and Emily Barton, in their ancestral home in Houghton Regis. Cooper studied Latin, French, and English history at Dunstable until 1912. While he adapted to English school discipline and learned the requisite social graces, he never adjusted to the rigid class structure and formal Eton collars he was required to wear.
Cooper's mother accompanied her sons back to the United States in August 1912, and Cooper resumed his education at Johnson Grammar School in Helena. He left Helena High School after two years in 1918 and returned to the family ranch to work full-time as a cowboy. In 1919, Charles arranged for Cooper to attend Gallatin County High School in Bozeman, Montana, where English teacher Ida Davis encouraged him to focus on academics and participate in debating and dramatics. Cooper later called Davis "the woman partly responsible for me giving up cowboying and going to college."
Cooper was still attending high school in 1920 when he took three art courses at Montana Agricultural College in Bozeman. His interest in art was inspired years earlier by the Western paintings of Charles Marion Russell and Frederic Remington. Cooper especially admired and studied Russell's Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross' Hole (1910), which still hangs in the state capitol building in Helena.
In 1922, Cooper enrolled in Grinnell College in Iowa to continue his art education. Cooper did well academically in most of his courses, but was not accepted into the school's drama club. His drawings and watercolors were exhibited throughout the dormitory, and he was named art editor for the college yearbook. During the summers of 1922 and 1923, Cooper worked at Yellowstone National Park as a tour guide driving the yellow open-top buses. Despite a promising first eighteen months at Grinnell, he left college suddenly in February 1924, spent a month in Chicago looking for work as an artist, and then returned to Helena, where he sold editorial cartoons to the Independent, a local newspaper.
In 1924, Cooper went to Los Angeles. There he unsuccessfully sought work as a political cartoonist or artist for an advertising agency. He became a door-to-door salesman of discount coupons for a photography studio in order to earn a living. Cooper took the advice of two Montana friends who were former rodeo stars, and joined them as an extra in motion picture westerns in 1925. Soon realizing how much leading cowboy players earned, he decided to become an actor. He took the name "Gary" to distinguish himself from an abundance of Frank Coopers then in Hollywood. But not until The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) did he secure a key supporting role. Although the film received mixed notices, Cooper won much praise. Paramount Pictures soon signed a contract with him.
Cooper possessed a natural, understated capacity to project himself before a camera. In Wings (1927), a World War I epic, he appeared for only 127 seconds, yet his portrayal of a doomed flyer stole the film. Somehow, Cooper bridged the gap between the male acting styles of the 1920s. Neither completely the child-boy of Buddy Rogers, nor the hardened warrior of William S. Hart, he managed to combine a measure of innocence about women and ideas with a knowledge about the ways of the West and its traditions.
Cooper was soon starring in films and, with the aid of skilled sound engineers, easily shifted his talents and light baritone voice to talking pictures. One of his first, The Virginian (1929), helped to stereotype him as the classic cinema man of the West (even though fewer than one-fourth of all his feature films were Westerns). In Morocco (1930) Cooper played a narcissistic cad in the Foreign Legion, while in A Farewell to Arms (1932) he sensitively portrayed the suffering protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's novel. His critical notices tended to improve, though some reviewers dismissed him as a mere matinee idol.
Between 1936 and 1943, Cooper's career took a new direction. He enjoyed a succession of box office and critical triumphs that transformed his screen image from the young (sometime) roue to an inherently good Mr. Everyman. For director Frank Capra, Cooper starred in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1941). An Academy Award and New York Film Critics Prize for best actor resulted from his portrayal of the title character in Sergeant York (1941). A year later he gave what some critics held to be an even finer performance as Lou Gehrig, in The Pride of the Yankees. In 1943 he again starred as a Hemingway hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which, while drained of its leftist political material, proved a box office hit because of the romantic pairing of Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Most of these films cast him as a noble hero.
That image was hard to maintain between 1943 and 1952, as Cooper groped for good vehicles. Such attempts at self-parody as Casanova Brown (1944) and Good Sam (1948) served him ill, and potboilers like Dallas (1950) were best forgotten. His boyish thinness turned to middle-aged gauntness, and improper lighting often caused him to appear far older than his years. Furthermore, into the 1950s he was wracked by an unhappy personal life and ill health, which often prevented him from selecting good scripts and delivering able performances. His lack of self-confidence caused Cooper to rely for career advice on such middlebrow trendsetters as director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. They encouraged him to protect his screen image by choosing "safe" stories.
Cooper's greatest critical success came with a film scripted by Carl Foreman, a writer accused of Communist biases. In High Noon (1952), a western, Cooper played Will Kane, a retiring town marshal. On his wedding day Kane has to defend himself against an old nemesis—arriving on the midday train—who intends to kill him. As noon approaches, both the townspeople he has served and his bride desert him. Cooper masterfully played the tortured marshal, whom he admiringly identified with his father. His physical maladies and weariness, which so hampered his later performances, worked to his advantage in High Noon. So did close editing, skillful direction, and an evocative musical score.
Cooper's subsequent roles drew mixed notices. Occasionally critics underrated good films such as Vera Cruz (1954), directed by Robert Aldrich, and Man of the West (1958), directed by Anthony Mann. Most hailed his portrayal of a Quaker father in Friendly Persuasion (1956). Otherwise he remained subject to miscasting or indifferent work and inept direction, problems he eventually recognized.
By 1960, Cooper had decided to alter the direction of his career. Entering television, he narrated a widely hailed documentary, "The Real West" (1961), which tried to separate the frontier realities from the images in the television westerns he had come to detest. Cooper also planned to play more morally ambivalent characters, beginning with The Naked Edge (1961), in which he portrayed a mercurial businessman suspected of murder by his wife.
As Cooper lay dying of cancer, Pope John XXIII, President John F. Kennedy, and Queen Elizabeth II sent get-well messages, which demonstrated Cooper's position as a beloved modern folk hero, and also the industry's mythmaking capacity. Cooper died at Los Angeles on May 13, 1961. His death, which followed Gable's by about six months, seemed to many to signal the end of an era in Hollywood.
Gary Cooper possessed a distinctive screen image that mirrored much that was worthy in the American character. By box office figures, Cooper was the most popular male film star of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He was known for his phlegmatic, minimalist manner and found success in various film genres, including westerns, crime, comedy and drama and was considered as a versatile actor.
Cooper received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles in Sergeant York and High Noon. He also received an Academy Honorary Award for his career achievements in 1961. He was one of the top ten film personalities for twenty-three consecutive years and was one of the top money-making stars for eighteen years. The American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Cooper eleventh on its list of the twenty-five greatest male stars of classic Hollywood cinema. Three of his characters—Will Kane, Lou Gehrig, and Sergeant York—made AFI's list of the one hundred greatest heroes and villains, all of them as heroes.
On February 6, 1960, Cooper was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6243 Hollywood Boulevard for his contribution to the film industry. He was also awarded a star on the sidewalk outside the Ellen Theater in Bozeman, Montana. On May 6, 1961, he was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters in recognition of his significant contribution to the arts. On July 30, 1961, he was posthumously awarded the David di Donatello Special Award in Italy for his career achievements. In 1966, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. In 2015, he was inducted into the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Hall of Fame.
Cooper was baptized in the Anglican Church in December 1911 in England, and was raised in the Episcopal Church in the United States. While he was never an observant Christian during his adult life, many of his friends believed he had a deeply spiritual side.
On June 26, 1953, Cooper accompanied his wife and daughter, who were devout Catholics, to Rome, where they had an audience with Pope Pius XII. Cooper and his wife were still separated at the time, but the papal visit marked the beginning of their gradual reconciliation. In the coming years, Cooper contemplated his mortality and his personal behavior, and started discussing Catholicism with his family. He began attending church with them regularly, and met with their parish priest, who offered Cooper spiritual guidance. After several months of study, Cooper was baptized as a Roman Catholic on April 9, 1959, before a small group of family and friends at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills.
Politics
Like his father, Cooper was a conservative Republican; he voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932, and campaigned for Wendell Willkie in 1940. When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented fourth presidential term in 1944, Cooper campaigned for Thomas E. Dewey and criticized Roosevelt for being dishonest and adopting "foreign" ideas. In a radio address that he paid for himself just prior to the election, Cooper said, "I disagree with the New Deal belief that the America all of us love is old and worn-out and finished—and has to borrow foreign notions that don't even seem to work any too well where they come from ... Our country is a young country that just has to make up its mind to be itself again." He also attended a Republican rally at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that drew 93,000 Dewey supporters.
Cooper was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a conservative organization dedicated, according to its statement of principles, to preserving the "American way of life" and opposing communism and fascism. The organization — whose membership included Walter Brennan, Laraine Day, Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Hedda Hopper, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Stanwyck, and John Wayne — advised the United States Congress to investigate communist influence in the motion picture industry. On October 23, 1947, Cooper appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was asked if he had observed any "communistic influence" in Hollywood. Cooper recounted statements he'd heard suggesting that the Constitution was out of date and that Congress was an unnecessary institution—comments that Cooper said he found to be "very un-American". He also testified that he had rejected several scripts because he thought they were "tinged with communist ideas". Unlike some other witnesses, Cooper did not name any individuals during his testimony.
Views
Quotations:
"Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
"In Westerns you were permitted to kiss your horse but never your girl."
"One nice thing about silence is that it can't be repeated."
"One man who saw through his own eyes and thought with his own brain. Such men may be rare, they may be unknown, but they move the world."
"Until I came along all the leading men were handsome, but luckily they wrote a lot of stories about the fellow next door."
"No mistake. I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body."
"There ain't never a horse that never been rode; there ain't never a rider that can't be thrown."
"It’s literally true, as Shakespeare said - all the world’s a stage. It wasn’t that way when I first got into the movies in 1924, but it is now. That’s why I find Hollywood newer and more exciting every day. Whatever you hear it’s still a place where a kid from Montana can jump on a horse, ride that-a-way, and keep right on going."
"This is a terrible place to spend your life in. Nobody in Hollywood is normal. Absolutely nobody. And they have such a vicious attitude toward one another. They say much worse things about each other than outsiders say about them, and nobody has any real friends."
"People ask me how come you've been around so long. Well, it's through playing the part of Mr Average Joe American."
"For me the really satisfying things I do are offered me, free, for nothing. Ever go out in the fall and do a little hunting? See the frost on the grass and the leaves turning? Spend a day in the hills alone, or with good companions? Watch a sunset and a moonrise? Notice a bird in the wind? A stream in the woods, a storm at sea, cross the country by train, and catch a glimpse of something beautiful in the desert, or the farmlands? Free to everybody ..."
Personality
Cooper was naturally reserved and introspective, and loved the solitude of outdoor activities. Not unlike his screen persona, his communication style frequently consisted of long silences with an occasional "yup" and "shucks". He once said, "If others have more interesting things to say than I have, I keep quiet." According to his friends, Cooper could also be an articulate, well-informed conversationalist on topics ranging from horses, guns, and Western history to film production, sports cars, and modern art.
He was modest and unpretentious, frequently downplaying his acting abilities and career accomplishments. His friends and colleagues described him as charming, well-mannered, and thoughtful, with a lively boyish sense of humor. Cooper maintained a sense of propriety throughout his career and never misused his movie star status—never sought special treatment or refused to work with a director or leading lady.
Part of Cooper's success on screen was due to his capacity to appeal to both women and men. Women found his boyish charm and good looks irresistible. Men regarded his unassuming, polite manner less threatening than the style of such other love idols as Clark Gable.
Gary Cooper never abandoned his early love for art and drawing, and over the years, he and his wife acquired a private collection of modern paintings, including works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Cooper owned several works by Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1956. Cooper also had a lifelong passion for automobiles, with a collection that included a 1930 Duesenberg.
Cooper's twenty-year friendship with Ernest Hemingway began at Sun Valley in October 1940. The previous year, Hemingway drew upon Cooper's image when he created the character of Robert Jordan for the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The two shared a passion for the outdoors, and for years they hunted duck and pheasant, and skied together in Sun Valley. Both men admired the work of Rudyard Kipling—Cooper kept a copy of the poem "If—" in his dressing room—and retained as adults Kipling's sense of boyish adventure. As well as admiring Cooper's hunting skills and knowledge of the outdoors, Hemingway believed his character matched his screen persona, once telling a friend, "If you made up a character like Coop, nobody would believe it. He's just too good to be true." They saw each other often, and their friendship remained strong through the years.
Quotes from others about the person
Charlton Heston: "He projected the kind of man Americans would like to be, probably more than any actor that's ever lived."
Joel McCrea: "Coop never fought, he never got mad, he never told anybody off that I know of; everybody that worked with him liked him."
Interests
outdoor activities, hunting, dinner parties with his family and friends from the film industry, including directors Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, and Fred Zinnemann, and actors Joel McCrea, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Taylor
Writers
Rudyard Kipling
Artists
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso
Sport & Clubs
riding, fishing, skiing, scuba diving
Connections
Cooper was formally introduced to his future wife, twenty-year-old New York debutante Veronica Balfe, on Easter Sunday 1933 at a party given by her uncle, art director Cedric Gibbons. Called "Rocky" by her family and friends, she grew up on Park Avenue and attended finishing schools. Her stepfather was Wall Street tycoon Paul Shields. Cooper and Rocky were quietly married at her parents' Park Avenue residence on December 15, 1933. According to his friends, the marriage had a positive impact on Cooper, who turned away from past indiscretions and took control of his life. Athletic and a lover of the outdoors, Rocky shared many of Cooper's interests, including riding, skiing, and skeet-shooting. She organized their social life, and her wealth and social connections provided Cooper access to New York high society. Cooper and his wife owned homes in the Los Angeles area in Encino (1933–36), Brentwood (1936–53), and Holmby Hills (1954–61), and owned a vacation home in Aspen, Colorado (1949–53).
Gary and Veronica Cooper's daughter, Maria Veronica Cooper, was born on September 15, 1937. By all accounts, Gary was a patient and affectionate father, teaching Maria to ride a bicycle, play tennis, ski, and ride horses. Sharing many of her parents' interests, she accompanied them on their travels and was often photographed with them. Like her father, she developed a love for art and drawing. As a family they vacationed together in Sun Valley, Idaho, spent time at Rocky's parents' country house in Southampton, New York, and took frequent trips to Europe. Cooper and Rocky were legally separated on May 16, 1951, when Cooper moved out of their home. For over two years, they maintained a fragile and uneasy family life with their daughter. Cooper moved back into their home in November 1953, and their formal reconciliation occurred in February 1954.
Prior to his marriage, Cooper had a series of romantic relationships with leading actresses, beginning in 1927 with Clara Bow, who advanced his career by helping him get one of his first leading roles in Children of Divorce. Bow was also responsible for getting Cooper a role in Wings, which generated an enormous amount of fan mail for the young actor. In 1928, he had a relationship with another experienced actress, Evelyn Brent, whom he met while filming Beau Sabreur. In 1929, while filming The Wolf Song, Cooper began an intense affair with Lupe Vélez, which was the most important romance of his early life. During their two years together, Cooper also had brief affairs with Marlene Dietrich while filming Morocco in 1930 and with Carole Lombard while making I Take This Woman in 1931. During his year abroad in 1931–32, Cooper had an affair with the married Countess Dorothy di Frasso, while staying at her Villa Madama in Rome.
After he was married in December 1933, Cooper remained faithful to his wife until the summer of 1942, when he began an affair with Ingrid Bergman during the production of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Their relationship lasted through the completion of filming Saratoga Trunk in June 1943. In 1948, after finishing work on The Fountainhead, Cooper began an affair with actress Patricia Neal, his co-star. At first they kept their affair discreet, but eventually it became an open secret in Hollywood, and Cooper's wife confronted him with the rumors, which he admitted were true. He also confessed that he was in love with Neal, and continued to see her. Cooper and his wife were legally separated in May 1951, but he did not seek a divorce. Neal later claimed that Cooper hit her after she went on a date with Kirk Douglas, and that he arranged for her to have an abortion when she became pregnant with Cooper's child. Neal ended their relationship in late December 1951. During his three-year separation from his wife, Cooper was rumored to have had affairs with Grace Kelly, Lorraine Chanel, and Gisèle Pascal.
Father:
Charles Henry Cooper
(1865–1946)
Charles Henry Cooper was a prominent lawyer, rancher, and (later) a Montana Supreme Court justice.
Mother:
Alice Louise Cooper
(née Brazier, 1873–1967)
Spouse:
Veronica Balfe
(née Balfe; May 27, 1913 – February 16, 2000)
Veronica Balfe was an American actress who appeared in a few films under the name Sandra Shaw.
Brother:
Arthur Cooper
Daughter:
Maria Cooper
(b. September 15, 1937, Los Angeles, California, United States)
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the Iceberg Theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations.