Start of Acting Career
Cooper first appeared in films as an extra with his grandmother, who would bring him along in hopes of aiding her own attempts to get extra work. At age three, Jackie appeared in Lloyd Hamilton comedies under the name of "Leonard".
He graduated to bit parts in feature films such as Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 and Sunny Side Up. His director in these two films, David Butler, recommended the boy to director Leo McCarey, who arranged an audition for the Our Gang comedy series produced by Hal Roach. Cooper joined the series in the short Boxing Gloves in 1929, signing to a three-year contract. He initially was only a supporting character in the series, but by early 1930 he had done so well with the transition to sound films that he had become one of the Gang's major characters. He was the main character in the episodes The First Seven Years, When the Wind Blows, and others. His most notable Our Gang shorts explore his crush on Miss Crabtree, the schoolteacher played by June Marlowe, which included the trilogy of shorts Teacher's Pet, School's Out, and Love Business.
According to his autobiography, Cooper, under contract to Hal Roach Studios, was loaned in the spring of 1931 to Paramount to star in Skippy (directed by his uncle, Norman Taurog), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor — the youngest actor ever (at the age of 9) to be nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor. Although Paramount paid Roach $25,000 for Cooper's services, Cooper received only his standard Roach salary of $50 per week.
The movie catapulted young Cooper to super-stardom. Our Gang producer Hal Roach sold Jackie's contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in mid-1931, as he felt the youngster would have a better future in features. He began a long on-screen relationship with actor Wallace Beery in such films as The Champ (1931), The Bowery (1933), The Choices of Andy Purcell (1933), Treasure Island (1934), and O'Shaughnessy's Boy (1935). A legion of film critics and fans have lauded the relationship between the two as an example of classic movie magic. However, in his autobiography Cooper wrote that Beery was "a big disappointment", and accused him of upstaging and other attempts to undermine the boy's performances out of what Cooper presumed was jealousy.
Cooper played the title role in the first two Henry Aldrich movies, What a Life (1939) and Life with Henry (1941).
Read more about this topic: Jackie Cooper
Famous quotes containing the words start of, start, acting and/or career:
“Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt ... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.”
—Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870)
“... God allows the wheat and the tares to grow up together, and ... the tares frequently get the start of the wheat and kill it out. The only difference between the wheat and human beings is that the latter have intellect and ought to combine and pull out the tares, root and branch.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“It especially helps if you know that we’re all faking our adulthood—even your parents and their parents. Beneath these adult trappings—in our president, in our parents, in you and me—lurk the emotions of a child. If we know that only about ourselves, we become infantile; if we understand that about everybody, then we have nothing to be ashamed of—unless, of course, we go around acting like a child and expecting everyone else to act like grownups.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)