![]() Warner Brothers hired Cagney and Blondell to recreate their roles in the film adaptation, Sinner's Holiday (1930). 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 murder in a carnival setting. ![]() His major break came in 1929, when the esteemed playwright George Kelly chose him to play a swaggering urban roughneck in Maggie the Magnificent. 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. 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. In September 1925 Cagney made his debut on the legitimate stage as a hobo in the play Outside Looking In. 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 an abortive first attempt to try his luck in films, Cagney moved to Los Angeles, where he and Billie opened a dance studio. Also in the chorus was a young woman named Frances Willard Vernon, who was called "Billie." She and Cagney married early in 1922 and they remained happily wedded for the rest of Cagney's life. Cagney made his Broadway debut on 29 September 1920 in the chorus of a revue called Pitter Patter. ![]() He was hired, and, ironically, the future tough guy of gangster pictures first appeared on stage in drag. Cagney had no formal training as a dancer, but he moved well and learned quickly. After graduating with honors from Stuyvesant High School in 1917, Cagney enrolled in Columbia University, but he had to withdraw after a year when his father died, at age forty-one, from Spanish influenza.Ĭagney 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. Among his siblings he was closest to William, who was later his associate and adviser in Hollywood, and Jeanne, who acted in a number of his films. He later drew on his recollections to create the screen roles that earned him worldwide fame.Ĭagney was also a hard worker who took on a variety of odd jobs to help his struggling family and a dedicated student. 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. Nevertheless he learned to use his fists in street fights and even achieved a modest success as an amateur boxer. 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. ![]() When he was eight, his family moved uptown to the Yorkville section, then a working-class neighborhood of Germans, Irish, Italians, and Jews. Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the son of James Francis Cagney, an alcoholic bartender and saloon proprietor, and Carolyn (Nelson) Cagney, a housewife, James was one of seven children, two of whom died in infancy.
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