Background

James Francis "Jimmy" Cagney was born on July 17, 1899, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City.

His father, James Francis Cagney Sr., was of Irish descent. At 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 was sickly 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 his family had to endure. The family moved twice while he was still young, first to East 79th Street, and then to East 96th Street.

Cagney credited his mother for the fact that, unlike a number of his childhood friends, neither he nor his brothers slipped into a life of crime.

Education

James 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.

Career

Cagney was working as a package wrapper at Wanamaker's Department Store when a fellow clerk told him about an opening in the chorus of a revue at Keith's 86th Street Theater. Cagney had no formal training as a dancer, but he moved well and learned quickly. He was hired, and, ironically, the future tough guy of gangster pictures first appeared on stage in drag. Cagney made his Broadway debut on 29 September 1920 in the chorus of a revue called Pitter Patter. In an abortive first attempt to try his luck in films, Cagney moved to Los Angeles, where he and Billie opened a dance studio. When that failed, they toured for three years on the small-time vaudeville circuit as a song-and-dance team called Vernon and Nye.

In September 1925 Cagney made his debut on the legitimate stage as a hobo in the play Outside Looking In. Impressed with Cagney's performance, George Abbott cast him as the lead, a hoofer in a speakeasy populated with Runyonesque guys and dolls, in the London production of a big hit, Broadway. Although Cagney was fired when he refused to simply provide a copy of Lee Tracy's original performance, he went on to understudy the lead in the Broadway production and eventually played a small role. His major break came in 1929, when the esteemed playwright George Kelly chose him to play a swaggering urban roughneck in Maggie the Magnificent. Cagney and Joan Blondell, as a wisecracking, gum-chewing flapper, received positive reviews, and later the same year both were cast again as colorful lowlifes in Penny Arcade, a melodrama about a murder in a carnival setting. After a screen test, Warner Brothers hired Cagney and Blondell to recreate their roles in the film adaptation, Sinner's Holiday (1930). Cagney was thirty when he arrived in Beverly Hills, California, in April 1930 to launch a career that would endure for more than three decades.

Cagney became a star in his fifth film, The Public Enemy (1931), a landmark gangster saga that chronicles the rise and fall of a daredevil kid from the slums who slugs his way to the top of the underworld. As Tom Powers, Cagney is subversively charismatic. Playing a ruthless, misogynistic hoodlum, his most famous gesture is shoving a grapefruit in the face of a nagging mistress. Cagney is both brutal and appealing, a combustible combination that incited the disapproval of censors.

Following The Public Enemy, Warner Brothers exploited their new star by assigning him to a succession of low-budget films with urban settings. He was not always cast as a criminal. For instance, in Taxi! (1932), he is the leader of independent cabbies in a taxi strike; in The Crowd Roars (1932), he appears as a self-destructive racecar driver; and in Winner Take All (1932), he is a prizefighter. But he was slotted into the mold of a fast-talking proletarian with a touch of the con artist, and only a few films in this hectic phase of his career offered relief from routine roles, which Cagney increasingly resisted. In Footlight Parade (1933), as a hard-driving impresario who stages splashy theatrical prologues for film palaces, he at last demonstrated the musical skills he had honed in vaudeville. In Max Reinhardt's spectacular version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), a unique departure for Cagney as well as his studio, Cagney delivers a vigorous low-comedy performance as Bottom, but in the same year, he was forced to appear in five other films cut to the measure of conventional studio formulas.

By the end of 1935, Cagney was drained from overwork, complaining about the recycled scripts he was handed, and bruised from fighting with Jack Warner, his intransigent boss, for a higher salary. Determined to exert greater creative control over his career, Cagney left Warner Brothers and, with his brother William, set up a small, independent company, Grand National Pictures. While the two films Cagney made under this new arrangement were neither commercial nor artistic successes, they clearly indicated how he wished to present himself. In the revealingly titled Great Guy (1936), he plays a staunch crusader determined to correct fraud in the weights and measures bureau. In Something to Sing About (1937), he is a bandleader who engagingly sings and dances his way to Hollywood stardom.

In 1938, Cagney returned to Warner Brothers, where, playing a fast-talking screenwriter, he co-starred with his good friend Pat O'Brien in Boy Meets Girl. He and O'Brien eventually made eight films together. Later in 1938, Cagney achieved one of his greatest successes, as a recidivist hoodlum in Angels with Dirty Faces. Returning to his old neighborhood, Cagney's character, Rocky Sullivan, is idolized by a local youth gang. After he is sentenced to death, his boyhood pal, now a parish priest played by O'Brien, urges him to sacrifice his "honor" by pretending to walk the last mile as a coward, thereby demolishing his image as a hero in the eyes of the gang. Cagney's virtuoso shrieks and screams leave the viewer uncertain whether the character is faking, as the priest requested, or is truly frightened. In The Roaring Twenties (1939), he plays another criminal with an atavistic drive to conquer the underworld, and again he has a bravura death scene, this time enacted in snow on the steps of a church. Both Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties have a valedictory aura while casting a nostalgic glance at the roles he played early in the decade, but Cagney was fated to return on-screen to a life of crime.

Cagney and his brother established William Cagney Productions, and their films were distributed by United Artists. As in his first hiatus from studio domination, Cagney's second group of independent works is revealing and disappointing. In Johnny Come Lately (1943), he plays a journalist at war against corrupt small-town politicians. In Blood on the Sun (1945), he is another crusading reporter, determined to thwart Japan's plans for world conquest. In marked contrast to his hyperactive performances in urban pictures, he is a sedentary barroom philosopher in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1948).

Cagney made few films during the World War II years. Eager to abandon his con man persona, he was unable to create a potent new image, and he began to resemble an actor from another era who had settled into comfortable semi-retirement, working only when it suited him. Then, at the end of the decade, he returned again to Warner Brothers to make yet another crime picture. In White Heat (1949), as a trigger-happy, mother-dominated outlaw who suffers from blinding headaches, he gives the most intense performance of his career. Grown stout and homelier than ever, Cagney is electric-the performing energy unaccountably held in reserve since Yankee Doodle Dandy released at fever pitch. Curling up on his mother's lap, slugging his greedy, two-timing mistress, barking orders to his dim-witted henchmen, evading the law as if in retreat from the Furies, he proffers his most physical performance. The role afforded him his two most bravura acting moments: in prison, when he learns of his mother's death, he cracks up operatically, and at the end, just before the gas tank he has climbed upon explodes, he exultantly shouts, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

White Heat inaugurated a final Cagney renaissance, during which he freelanced among a number of major studios. As in his heyday in the 1930s, the quality of his material varied, but Cagney was clearly eager to accept challenges. He appeared in musicals, including West Point Story (1950), The Seven Little Foys (1955), and Never Steal Anything Small (1958); war comedies, including What Price Glory? (1952) and Mister Roberts (1955); Westerns, including Run for Cover (1955) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956); a soap opera, These Wilder Years (1956); and biographical dramas, playing Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) and Admiral William F. Halsey, a World War II hero, in The Gallant Hours (1960).

During the 1950s, he portrayed villains in only two films, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), a strikingly mean-spirited film noir, and Love Me or Leave Me (1955), in which he is a tyrannical racketeer with a limp. Tellingly, these are his most persuasive performances of the decade. His final reprise of the sharp, confident persona he created in the 1930s is an effulgent display in One, Two, Three (1961), in which he appears as a take-charge representative of American capitalism in postwar Berlin. Along with Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, this movie is among the fastest talking of American films, and in his ebullient staccato delivery, Cagney concedes nothing to his advancing age and weight. After One, Two, Three was completed, Cagney at long last did what he had intermittently threatened throughout his career—he hung up his hat and retired to the life of a gentleman farmer in Dutchess County. He continued to receive acting offers but was tempted only once, when he was asked to play a cockney, Alfred P. Doolittle, in My Fair Lady. When he declined, the role was given to Stanley Holloway, who recreated his original Broadway performance.

In 1976 he published Cagney by Cagney, a casual, sketchy account of his life and career in which he distanced himself from his crime-movie persona. In 1980 Cagney made the mistake of returning to films. Visibly aged, heavyset, and with a vacant look in his eyes, he gives an all but immobile performance as the sheriff in Ragtime (1981), an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's novel (1974).

Cagney died at his Dutchess County farm in Stanfordville, New York, on Easter Sunday 1986, of a heart attack. He was 86 years old. He died 4 days after his brother William’s 81st birthday. A funeral Mass was held at Manhattan's St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church. Cagney was interred in a crypt in the Garden Mausoleum at Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York.

Achievements

• James Cagney inaugurated a new film persona, a city boy with a staccato rhythm who was the first great archetype in the American talking picture. He was a true icon, and his essential integrity illuminated and deepened even the most depraved of the characters he portrayed. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its list of greatest male stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
  
  James Cagney won the Academy Award in 1943 for his performance as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy.
  
  For his contributions to the film industry, Cagney was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star located at 6504 Hollywood Boulevard. In 1974, Cagney received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980, and a Career Achievement Award from the U.S. National Board of Review in 1981. In 1984, Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  
  In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 33-cent stamp honoring Cagney.
  
  On May 19, 2015, a new musical celebrating Cagney, and dramatizing his relationship with Warner Bros., opened off-Broadway in New York City at the York Theatre. Cagney, The Musical has since moved to the Westside Theatre.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Sinners' Holiday 1930
  • The Doorway to Hell 1930
  • Blonde Crazy 1931
  • Smart Money 1931
  • The Public Enemy 1931
  • Winner Take All 1932
  • The Crowd Roars 1932
  • Taxi! 1932
  • Lady Killer 1933
  • Footlight Parade 1933
  • The Mayor of Hell 1933
  • Picture Snatcher 1933
  • Angels with Dirty Faces 1938
  • White Heat 1949
  • Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942
  • G Men 1935
  • Devil Dogs of the Air 1935
  • Frisco Kid 1935
  • Great Guy 1936
  • Ceiling Zero 1936
  • Something to Sing About 1937

Religion

James Cagney was confirmed at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church in Manhattan, where he would eventually have his funeral service.

Politics

In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However, the emerging labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s soon forced him to take sides. The first version of the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935 and growing tensions between labor and management fueled the movement. Fanzines in the 1930s, however, described his politics as "radical".

This somewhat exaggerated view was enhanced by his public contractual wranglings with Warner Bros. at the time, his joining of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, and his involvement in the revolt against the so-called "Merriam tax". The "Merriam tax" was an underhanded method of funneling studio funds to politicians; during the 1934 Californian gubernatorial campaign, the studio executives would 'tax' their actors, automatically taking a day's pay from their biggest-earners, ultimately sending nearly half a million dollars to the gubernatorial campaign of Frank Merriam. Cagney (as well as Jean Harlow) publicly refused to pay and Cagney even threatened that, if the studios took a day's pay for Merriam's campaign, he would give a week's pay to Upton Sinclair, Merriam's opponent in the race.

Cagney supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney's defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney's supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being "a soft touch". This donation enhanced his liberal reputation. He also became involved in a "liberal group...with a leftist slant," along with Ronald Reagan. However, when Reagan and he saw the direction the group was heading, they resigned on the same night.

Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter's writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney's donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared by U.S. Representative Martin Dies Jr., on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

During World War II, Cagney raised money for war bonds by taking part in racing exhibitions at the Roosevelt Raceway and selling seats for the premiere of Yankee Doodle Dandy. He also let the Army practice maneuvers at his Martha's Vineyard farm.

After the war, Cagney's politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential campaigns, including the 1940 presidential election against Wendell Willkie. However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote.

By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan's bid for the presidency in the 1980 election. As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as "arch-conservative". He regarded his move away from liberal politics as "a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system... Those functionless creatures, the hippies ... just didn't appear out of a vacuum."

Views

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."

Quotations: “You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.”

“I never had the slightest difficulty with a fellow actor. Not until One, Two, Three. In that picture, Horst Buchholz tried all sorts of scene-stealing didoes. I came close to knocking him on his ass.”

“I never said, 'MMMmmm, you dirty rat!”

“There's not much to say about acting but this. Never settle back on your heels. Never relax. If you relax, the audience relaxes. And always mean everything you say.”

“I`m sick of carrying guns and beating up women.”

“My childhood was surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad's alcoholism, but as I said, we just didn't have the time to be impressed by all those misfortunes. I have an idea that the Irish possess a built-in don't-give-a-damn that helps them through all the stress.”

“Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.”

“I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of it, through.”

“The Postman Always RingsTwice.”

“Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to have a bike.”

“My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking.”

“Learn your lines… plant your feet… look the other actor in the eye… say the words… mean them.”

“Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.”

“Absorption in things other than self is the secret of a happy life.”

“Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth.”

“Once a song and dance man, always a song and dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.”

“You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.”

Membership

Cagney became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1942 for a two-year term.

• 

  Screen Actors Guild , United States

  1942

Personality

Wearing a mask of toughness for self-protection, the young Cagney was in fact a thoughtful, keen observer of life in the teeming city streets. He later drew on his recollections to create the screen roles that earned him worldwide fame.

Cagney was in exactly the right place at the right time. Unlike well-spoken stage actors who were imported to Hollywood in the first years of talking pictures, Cagney had an unreconstructed city-streets accent. His natural speech and movement proved to be ideally suited to the new medium. The movie-going audience could more readily identify with Cagney's proletarian image than with actors who had immaculate diction and a patrician manner.

Cagney was a very private man, and while he was willing to give the press opportunities for photographs, he generally spent his time out of the public eye. Orson Welles said of Cagney, "(he was) maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera", and Stanley Kubrick considered him to be one of the best actors of all time.

In youth he learned to use his fists in street fights and even achieved a modest success as an amateur boxer. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York state lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it.

He also played semiprofessional baseball for a local team, and entertained dreams of playing in the Major Leagues.

Cagney greatly enjoyed painting, and claimed in his autobiography that he might have been happier, if somewhat poorer, as a painter than a movie star. The renowned painter Sergei Bongart taught Cagney in his later life and owned two of Cagney's works. Cagney often gave away his work, but refused to sell his paintings, considering himself an amateur. He signed and sold only one painting, purchased by Johnny Carson to benefit a charity.

As a young man, Cagney became interested in farming – sparked by a soil conservation lecture he had attended – to the extent that during his first walkout from Warner Bros., he helped to found a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in Martha's Vineyard. Cagney loved that no concrete roads surrounded 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.

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. He turned it into a working farm, 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 agriculture and farming that his diligence and efforts were rewarded by an honorary degree from Florida's Rollins College. Rather than just "turning up with Ava Gardner on my arm" to accept his honorary degree, Cagney turned the tables upon the college's faculty by writing and submitting a paper on soil conservation.

Cagney loved horses from childhood. As a child, he often sat on the horses of local deliverymen, and rode in horse-drawn streetcars with his mother. As an adult, well after horses were replaced by automobiles as the primary mode of transportation, Cagney raised horses on his farms, specializing in Morgans, a breed of which he was particularly fond.

Cagney was a keen sailor and owned boats harbored on both US coasts. His joy in sailing, however, did not protect him from occasional seasickness—becoming ill, sometimes, on a calm day while weathering rougher, heavier seas at other times.

Physical Characteristics: Cagney was red-haired and blue-eyed.

Short, decidedly ethnic in face and voice, he lacked the glamour and sex appeal of romantic leading men. Rather, he inaugurated a new film persona, a city boy with a staccato rhythm who was the first great archetype in the American talking picture. Quick, savvy, and feisty, he bristled with urban energy, swinging his arms when he walked and jabbing the air with his fists.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  boxing, baseball

Connections

In 1920, Cagney was a member of the chorus for the show Pitter Patter, where he met Frances Willard "Billie" Vernon. They married on September 28, 1922, and the marriage lasted until his death in 1986. Frances Cagney died in 1994. In 1941, they adopted a son whom they named James Francis Cagney III, and later a daughter, Cathleen "Casey" Cagney.

Cagney's son married Jill Lisbeth Inness in 1962. The couple had two children, James IV and Cindy. James Cagney III died from a heart attack on January 27, 1984 in Washington, DC, two years before his 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 on August 11, 2004.

Father:

James Francis Cagney

(1875–1918)

Mother:

Carolyn Elizabeth Nelson Cagney

(1877–1945)

Spouse:

Frances Willard Vernon Cagney

(1899–1994)

Friend:

Mikhail Baryshnikov

(born January 27, 1948)

Mikhail Baryshnikov is a Soviet and American dancer, choreographer, and actor.

Brother:

Harry Vincent Cagney

(1898–1964)

Brother:

Edward S. Cagney

(1901–1968)

Brother:

William Jerome Cagney

(1905–1988)

Sister:

Grace Agnes Cagney

(1908–1908)

Brother:

Robert N. Cagney

(1916–1918)

Sister:

Jeanne Cagney

(1919–1984)

Son:

James Cagney Jr.

(1939–1984)

Daughter:

Cathleen Frances Cagney Thomas

(1940–2004)

Friend:

Ronald Reagan

(February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004)

Ronald Reagan was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989.

Friend:

Floyd Patterson

(January 4, 1935 – May 11, 2006)

Floyd Patterson was an American professional boxer who competed from 1952 to 1972, and twice reigned as the world heavyweight champion from 1956 to 1962.

References

• Cagney. A Biography
  1975
• Cagney: The Actor as Auteur
  1975
• James Cagney: A Celebration
  1985
• City Boys: A Critical Analysis of the Cinematic Careers of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield
  2018