Word: cagneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Forman who directed Cagney in Ragtime, the 1981 film that brought him back into the public eye after two decades of retirement. After completing Billy Wilder's 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, Cagney vowed to quit filmmaking. Content in the company of his wife and a small circle of friends, he divided his time between two farms in the East and a home in Beverly Hills. He dabbled in painting, bred horses and collected antique carriages. But with the help of Cagney's associates, Forman lured the actor out of retirement to play Ragtime's canny police commissioner...
...properly luminous finale for a man whose energy could light a city block. Born on New York City's Lower East Side, Cagney was the son of a hard- drinking bartender who was frequently absent from home. He was raised mostly by a strong mother who could cheer him on in a barefisted street brawl but stood resolutely in his way when he toyed with the idea of a professional fight career. She made no objections, however, when Cagney fast-talked his way into a $35-a-week vaudeville dancing job when...
...quickly graduated to Broadway musicals, then in 1930 was brought to Hollywood as a contract player for Warner Bros., the studio that had ushered in the talkies a few years earlier with The Jazz Singer. Many silent-film stars' careers were destroyed by the triumph of sound; Cagney's was ensured by it. He was one of the first actors to grab an audience by sending dialogue special delivery, with a style of high-speed utterance that could animate even the most inert exchanges...
...also perfectly matched to the trademark settings of the Warner films of the 1930s--the working world, where it was a struggle to keep a firm footing, and the underworld that waited for those who wavered and fell. By the end of his first few months in pictures, Cagney had made a name for himself with The Public Enemy. It was the movie in which he concluded the most famous breakfast scene in cinema history by squashing a grapefruit in Actress Mae Clarke's kisser...
Throughout the '30s, Cagney enjoyed stardom in a series of feisty, defiantly urban parts: a street-smart swindler in Blonde Crazy (1931), a slum-bred cop in G-Men (1935), a ruined bootlegger in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). By late in the decade he was one of the highest-paid actors in the country, a status he achieved partly by walking out repeatedly on Warners to press for higher pay and protest its grueling working conditions and bumper-to-bumper production schedule. For all his fame, Cagney had little taste for Hollywood night life. He liked best the company...