Gary Cooper - Career

Career

Unsuccessful as a salesman of electric signs and theatrical curtains, as a promoter for a local photographer and as an applicant for newspaper work in Los Angeles, Cooper found work as an actor in 1925. Beginning as an extra in the motion picture industry, usually being cast as a cowboy, he is known to have had an uncredited role in the Tom Mix Western Dick Turpin (1925). The following year, he received a screen credit in a two-reeler, Lightnin' Wins, with actress Eileen Sedgwick as his leading lady.

After the release of this short film, Cooper accepted a long-term contract with Paramount. He changed his name to Gary in 1925, following the advice of casting director Nan Collins, who felt it evoked the "rough, tough" nature of her native Gary, Indiana.

"Coop," as he was called by his peers, went on to appear in over 100 films. Cooper broke through in a supporting role in the late silent Wings (1927), the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, following it with Nevada (1927) co-starring Thelma Todd and William Powell, based on the Zane Gray novel. (This was remade as an early Robert Mitchum vehicle released in 1944, the only time Cooper and Mitchum played the same role.) Cooper became a major star with his first sound picture, The Virginian (1929) which features Walter Huston as the villainous Trampas. The Spoilers appeared the following year with Betty Compson (which was remade in 1942 with Marlene Dietrich, who resembled Compson, and John Wayne in Cooper's role). Cooper followed this action film with Morocco (1930), starring Dietrich, in which he played a Foreign Legionnaire. Devil and the Deep (1932) featured Cary Grant in a supporting role with Talullah Bankhead and Cooper in the leads alongside Charles Laughton. The following year, Cooper was the second lead in the sophisticated Ernst Lubitsch comedy production of Noël Coward's Design for Living. He was billed under Fredric March in the kind of fast-talking role Cooper never played again after Cary Grant staked out the light comedy leading man field with The Awful Truth four years later. The screen adaptation of A Farewell to Arms (1932), directed by Frank Borzage, and the title role in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) furthered Cooper's box-office appeal.

Cooper was producer David O. Selznick's first choice for the role of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. (1939). When Cooper turned down the role, he was passionately against it. He is quoted as saying, "Gone with the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his nose, not me". Alfred Hitchcock wanted him to star in Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942). Cooper later admitted he had made a "mistake" in turning down the director. For the former film, Hitchcock cast look-alike Joel McCrea instead.

Cooper cemented his cowboy credentials again in The Westerner (1940), with Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean, and followed that immediately afterward with the lavish North West Mounted Police (1940), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and featuring Paulette Goddard.

In 1942, Cooper won his first Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the title character in Sergeant York (1941). It has often been rumored that Alvin York refused to authorize a movie about his life unless Cooper portrayed him. Evidence has since surfaced that the film's producer, Jesse L. Lasky, sent a telegram pleading with Cooper to take the part and signed York's name to it. Meet John Doe had been released earlier in 1941, a great success under the direction of Frank Capra. Cooper worked with Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), directed by Sam Wood and based on a novel by Cooper's close friend Ernest Hemingway; they spent many vacations in Sun Valley, Idaho together. A Western comedy lampooning his hesitant speech and mannerisms and his own image in general followed called Along Came Jones (1945) in which he relied on gunslinging Loretta Young to save him. Cooper also starred with Patricia Neal in the original screen adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead (1949).

Cooper won his second Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (1952), sometimes thought his finest role. Ill with an ulcer and busy filming Blowing Wild (1953) in Mexico, he wasn't present to receive his Academy Award in February 1953. He asked John Wayne to accept it on his behalf, a bit of irony in light of Wayne's stated distaste for the film.

Cooper continued to play the lead in films almost to the end of his life. Among his later box office hits were the stark Western adventure Garden of Evil (1954) with Susan Hayward and Richard Widmark; Vera Cruz (1954), an extremely influential Western in which he guns down villain Burt Lancaster in a showdown; his portrayal of a Quaker farmer during the American Civil War in William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956); Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957) with Audrey Hepburn; and Anthony Mann's Man of the West (1958), a hard-edged action Western with Lee J. Cobb. His final motion picture was a British film, The Naked Edge (1961), made in London in the autumn of 1960. His final project was narrating an NBC documentary, The Real West, in which he helped clear up myths about legendary Western figures.