CAGNEY, JAMES

born July 17, 1899, New York, N.Y., U.S. died March 30, 1986, near Millbrook, N.Y. American actor noted for his versatile talents in musicals, comedies, and crime dramas. The son of an Irish bartender, he grew up in the rough Lower East Side of New York City. Touring in vaudeville as a song-and-dance man with his wife Frances in the 1920s, Cagney was a success opposite Joan Blondell in the Broadway musical Penny Arcade (1929) and repeated his performance in the movie version of the play, entitled Sinner's Holiday (1930). In the motion picture Public Enemy (1931) he played the first in a memorable series of sneering, explosive criminals. The films Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Each Dawn I Die (1939), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and White Heat (1949) starred Cagney in increasingly complex studies of criminal pathology. Cagney was also a talented song-and-dance man, and it was for his dynamic portrayal of showman George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) that he won an Academy Award for best actor. His other notable roles included that of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), the nave dentist in Strawberry Blonde (1941), the vengeful captain in Mister Roberts (1955), Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), the frenetic businessman in One, Two, Three (1961), and (after a 20-year retirement) the feisty police commissioner in Ragtime (1981). In 1974 Cagney was the recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. In 1984 he was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and in the same year he starred as an aging boxer in the television movie Terrible Joe Moran. His autobiography Cagney by Cagney was published in 1975.