Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper was an American actor known for his strong, silent screen persona and understated acting style. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice and had a further three nominations, as well as an Academy Honorary Award in 1961 for his career achievements. He was one of the top-10 film personalities for 23 consecutive years and one of the top money-making stars for 18 years. The American Film Institute ranked Cooper at number11 on its list of the 50 greatest screen legends.
Cooper's career spanned 36 years, from 1925 to 1961, and included leading roles in 84 feature films. He was a major movie star from the end of the silent film era through almost the end of the golden age of classical Hollywood. His screen persona appealed strongly to both men and women, and his range included roles in most major film genres. His ability to project his own personality onto the characters he played contributed to his natural and authentic appearance on screen. Throughout his career, he sustained a screen persona that represented the ideal American hero.
Cooper began his career as a film extra and stunt rider, but soon landed acting roles. After establishing himself as a Western hero in his early silent films, he became a movie star with his first sound picture, playing the title role in 1929's The Virginian. In the early 1930s, he expanded his heroic image to include more cautious characters in adventure films and dramas such as A Farewell to Arms and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. During the height of his career, Cooper portrayed a new type of hero, a champion of the common man in films such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire , The Pride of the Yankees, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He later portrayed more mature characters at odds with the world in films such as The Fountainhead and High Noon. In his final films, he played nonviolent characters searching for redemption in films such as Friendly Persuasion and Man of the West.
Early life
Frank James Cooper was born in Helena, Montana, on May 7, 1901, the younger of two sons of English immigrant parents Alice and Charles Henry Cooper. His brother, Arthur, was six years his senior. Cooper's father came from Houghton Regis, Bedfordshire, England and became a prominent lawyer, rancher, and Montana Supreme Court justice. His mother hailed from Gillingham, Kent, England, and married Charles in Montana. In 1906, Charles purchased the Seven-Bar-Nine cattle ranch, about north of Helena, near Craig. Cooper and Arthur spent their summers at the ranch and learned to ride horses, hunt and fish. Cooper attended Central Grade School in Helena.Alice wanted their sons to have a British education, so she took them back to the United Kingdom in 1909 to enroll them in Dunstable Grammar School in Dunstable, England. While there, Cooper and his brother lived with their father's cousins, William and Emily Barton, at their 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 formal Eton collars he was required to wear. He received his confirmation in the Church of England at the Church of All Saints in Houghton Regis on December 3, 1911. His mother accompanied their sons back to the U.S. in August 1912 and Cooper resumed his education in Montana, at Johnson Grammar School in Helena.
At age fifteen, Cooper injured his hip in a car accident. On his doctor's recommendation, he returned to the Seven-Bar-Nine ranch to recuperate with horseback riding. The misguided therapy left Cooper with his characteristic stiff, off-balanced walk and slightly angled horse-riding style. 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, his father arranged for his son to attend Gallatin County High School in Bozeman, 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 giving up cowboy-ing and going to college".
While in high school in 1920, Cooper 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, which still hangs in the state capitol building in Helena.
In 1922, to continue his art education, Cooper enrolled in Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. He did well academically in most of his courses but was not accepted into the school's drama club. His drawings and watercolor paintings 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 18 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 local Independent newspaper.
In autumn 1924, Cooper's father left the state supreme court bench and moved with his wife to Los Angeles to administer the estates of two relatives, and Cooper joined his parents there in November at his father's request. After briefly working a series of unpromising jobs, he met two friends from Montana, who were working as film extras and stunt riders in low-budget Western films for the small movie studios on Poverty Row. They introduced him to another Montana cowboy, rodeo champion Jay "Slim" Talbot, who took him to see a casting director. Wanting money for a professional art course, Cooper worked as a film extra for five dollars a day and as a stunt rider for $10. Cooper and Talbot became close friends and hunting companions; Talbot later worked as Cooper's stuntman and stand-in for over three decades.
Career
Silent films, 1925–1928
In early 1925, Cooper began his film career in silent pictures such as The Thundering Herd and Wild Horse Mesa with Jack Holt, Riders of the Purple Sage and The Lucky Horseshoe with Tom Mix, and The Trail Rider with Buck Jones. He worked for several Poverty Row studios, but also the already emergent major studios, Famous Players–Lasky and Fox Film Corporation. While his skilled horsemanship led to steady work in Westerns, Cooper found the stunt work, which sometimes injured horses and riders, "tough and cruel". Hoping to move beyond the risky stunt work and obtain acting roles, Cooper paid for a screen test and hired casting director Nan Collins to work as his agent. Knowing that other actors were using the name "Frank Cooper", Collins suggested he change his first name to "Gary" after her hometown of Gary, Indiana. Cooper immediately liked the name.Cooper also found work in a variety of non-Western films, appearing, for example, as a masked Cossack in The Eagle, as a Roman guard in Ben-Hur, and as a flood survivor in The Johnstown Flood. Gradually, he began to land credited roles that offered him more screen time, in films such as Tricks, in which he played the film's antagonist, and the short film Lightnin' Wins. As a featured player, he began to attract the attention of major film studios. On June 1, 1926, Cooper signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn Productions for $50 a week.
Cooper's first important film role was a supporting part in The Winning of Barbara Worth starring Ronald Colman and Vilma Bánky, in which he plays a young engineer who helps a rival suitor save the woman he loves and her town from an impending dam disaster. Cooper's experience living among the Montana cowboys gave his performance an "instinctive authenticity", according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. The film was a major success. Critics singled out Cooper as a "dynamic new personality" and future star. Goldwyn rushed to offer Cooper a long-term contract, but he held out for a better deal – a five-year contract with Jesse L. Lasky at Paramount Pictures for $175 a week. In 1927, with help from Clara Bow, Cooper landed high-profile roles in Children of Divorce and Wings, the latter being the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. That year, Cooper also appeared in his first starring roles in Arizona Bound and Nevada, both films directed by John Waters.
Paramount paired Cooper with Fay Wray in The Legion of the Condemned and The First Kiss, advertising them as the studio's "glorious young lovers". Their on-screen chemistry failed to generate much excitement with audiences. With each new film, Cooper's acting skills improved and his popularity continued to grow, especially among female movie-goers. During this time, he was earning as much as $2,750 per film and receiving 1,000 fan letters a week. Looking to exploit Cooper's growing audience appeal, the studio placed him opposite popular leading ladies such as Evelyn Brent in Beau Sabreur, Florence Vidor in Doomsday, and Esther Ralston in Half a Bride. Around the same time, Cooper made Lilac Time with Colleen Moore for First National Pictures, his first movie with synchronized music and sound effects. It became one of the most commercially successful films of 1928.
Hollywood stardom, 1929–1935
Cooper became a major movie star in 1929 playing the lead role in his first talking picture, The Virginian, which was directed by Victor Fleming and co-starred Mary Brian and Walter Huston. Based on the popular novel by Owen Wister, The Virginian was one of the first sound films to define the Western code of honor and helped establish many of the conventions of the Western movie genre that persist to the present day. According to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, the romantic image of the tall, handsome, and shy cowboy hero who embodied male freedom, courage, and honor was created in large part by Cooper in the film. Unlike some silent-film actors who had trouble adapting to the new sound medium, Cooper transitioned naturally, with his "deep and clear" and "pleasantly drawling" voice, which perfectly suited the characters he portrayed on screen. Looking to capitalize on Cooper's growing popularity, Paramount cast him in several Westerns and wartime dramas, including Only the Brave, The Texan, Seven Days' Leave, A Man from Wyoming, and The Spoilers. Norman Rockwell depicted Cooper in his role as The Texan for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on May 24, 1930.File:Lili Damita-Gary Cooper in Fighting Caravans.jpg|thumb|left|alt=Film still of Lili Damita and Gary Cooper|Lili Damita and Cooper in Fighting Caravans, 1931
One of the most important performances in Cooper's early career was his portrayal of a sullen legionnaire in Josef von Sternberg's film Morocco with Marlene Dietrich in her introduction to American audiences. During production, von Sternberg focused his energies on Dietrich and treated Cooper dismissively. Tensions came to a head after von Sternberg yelled directions at Cooper in German. The actor approached the director, picked him up by the collar, and said, "If you expect to work in this country, you'd better get on to the language we use here." Despite the tensions on the set, Cooper produced "one of his best performances", according to Thornton Delehanty of the New York Evening Post.
After returning to the Western genre in Zane Grey's Fighting Caravans with French actress Lili Damita, Cooper appeared in the Dashiell Hammett crime film City Streets, co-starring Sylvia Sidney and Paul Lukas, playing a westerner who gets involved with big-city gangsters to save the woman he loves. Cooper concluded the year with appearances in two unsuccessful films: I Take This Woman with Carole Lombard, and His Woman with Claudette Colbert. The demands and pressures of making 10 films in two years left Cooper exhausted and in poor health, suffering from anemia and jaundice. He had lost, and felt lonely, isolated, and depressed by his sudden fame and wealth. In May 1931, Cooper left Hollywood and sailed to Algiers and then Italy, where he lived for the next year.
During his time abroad, Cooper stayed with the Countess Dorothy di Frasso, the former Dorothy Cadwell Taylor, at the Villa Madama in Rome, where she taught him about good food and vintage wines, how to read Italian and French menus, and how to socialize among Europe's nobility and upper classes. After guiding him through the great art museums and galleries of Italy, she accompanied him on a 10-week big-game hunting safari on the slopes of Mount Kenya in East Africa, where he was credited with more than 60 kills, including two lions, a rhinoceros, and various antelopes. His safari experience in Africa had a profound influence on Cooper and intensified his love of the wilderness. After returning to Europe, the countess and he set off on a Mediterranean cruise of the Italian and French Rivieras. Rested and rejuvenated by his year-long exile, a healthy Cooper returned to Hollywood in April 1932 and negotiated a new contract with Paramount for two films per year, a salary of $4,000 a week, and director and script approval.
File:Gary Cooper-Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|alt=Film still of Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes|Cooper and Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms, 1932
In 1932, after completing Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead to fulfill his old contract, Cooper appeared in A Farewell to Arms, the first film adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway novel. Co-starring Helen Hayes, a leading New York theatre star and Academy Award winner, and Adolphe Menjou, the film presented Cooper with one of his most ambitious and challenging dramatic roles, playing an American ambulance driver wounded in Italy, who falls in love with an English nurse during World War I. Critics praised his highly intense and emotional performance, and the film became one of the year's most commercially successful pictures. In 1933, after making Today We Live with Joan Crawford and One Sunday Afternoon with Fay Wray, Cooper appeared in the Ernst Lubitsch comedy film Design for Living, based on the successful Noël Coward play. Co-starring Miriam Hopkins and Fredric March, the film was a box-office success, ranking as one of the top-10 highest-grossing films of 1933. All three of the lead actorsMarch, Cooper, and Hopkinsreceived attention from this film, as they were all at the peak of their careers. Cooper's performance, as an American artist in Europe competing with his playwright friend for the affections of a beautiful woman, was singled out for its versatility and revealed his genuine ability to do light comedy. Cooper changed his name legally to "Gary Cooper" in August 1933.
File:Gary Cooper and Anna Sten in The Wedding Night 1935.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|alt=Photo of Gary Cooper and Anna Sten embracing|Anna Sten and Cooper in The Wedding Night, 1935
In 1934, Cooper was lent out to MGM for the Civil War drama film Operator 13 with Marion Davies, about a beautiful Union spy who falls in love with a Confederate soldier. Despite Richard Boleslawski's imaginative direction and George J. Folsey's lavish cinematography, the film did poorly at the box office.
Back at Paramount, Cooper appeared in his first of seven films by director Henry Hathaway, Now and Forever, with Carole Lombard and Shirley Temple. In the film, he plays a confidence man who tries to sell his daughter to the relatives who raised her, but is eventually won over by the adorable girl. Impressed by Temple's intelligence and charm, Cooper developed a close rapport with her, both on and off screen. The film was a box-office success.
In 1935, Cooper was lent to Samuel Goldwyn Productions to appear in King Vidor's romance film The Wedding Night with Anna Sten, who was being groomed as "another Garbo". In the film, Cooper plays an alcoholic novelist who retreats to his family's New England farm, where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Polish neighbor. Cooper delivered a performance of surprising range and depth, according to biographer Larry Swindell. Despite receiving generally favorable reviews, the film was not popular with American audiences, who may have been offended by the film's depiction of an extramarital affair and its tragic ending.
Also in 1935, Cooper appeared in two Henry Hathaway films: the melodrama Peter Ibbetson with Ann Harding, about a man caught up in a dream world created by his love for a childhood sweetheart, and the adventure film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, about a daring British officer and his men who defend their stronghold at Bengal against rebellious local tribes. While the former, championed by the surrealists became more successful in Europe than in the United States, the latter was nominated for seven Academy Awards and became one of Cooper's most popular and successful adventure films. Hathaway had the highest respect for Cooper's acting ability, calling him "the best actor of all of them".