Gary Cooper Trivia

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In 1943 Cooper was one of the founding members of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, called merely "the Alliance" in the film community. Its other early leaders included Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Norman Taurog, Clarence Brown, and Walt Disney. Clark Gable, thought of as one whose apolitical inclination was even more pronounced than Cooper's, was also a member. The Alliance's cheerleader was Lela E. Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers. (imdb.com)

Appeared in 107 movies, 82 of which he starred in. Only 16 of those were filmed in color. And he starred in 14 silent movies. (imdb.com)

Appeared in two movies with Marlene Dietrich, Morocco (1930) and Desire (1936). (imdb.com)

Appeared in eight movies with Walter Brennan. These were Watch Your Wife (1926), The Wedding Night (1935), The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), The Westerner (1940), Meet John Doe (1941), Sergeant York (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and Task Force (1949). (imdb.com)

An uncomfortable aspect of They Came to Cordura (1959) was that besides looking far too old for his character, Cooper was looking so ill, and was actually filming against medical advice. Towards the end of the movie he was dragged a hundred yards along the ground by a railroad handcar, something Stanley Kauffmann complained about in the "New Republic". (imdb.com)

He considered himself to be miscast in Peter Ibbetson (1935), The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), Saratoga Trunk (1945) and Ten North Frederick (1958). (imdb.com)

Separated from his wife Rocky in May 1951, mainly over his affair with Patricia Neal. They did not live together again until July 1954. (imdb.com)

He won an Oscar for playing Alvin C. York in Sergeant York (1941), making him one of twelve actors to win the Award for playing a real person who was still alive at the evening of the Award ceremony (as of 2007). The other eleven actors and their respective performances are: Spencer Tracy for playing Father Edward Flanagan in Boys Town (1938), Patty Duke for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962), Jason Robards for playing Benjamin Bradlee in All the President's Men (1976), Robert De Niro for playing Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), Sissy Spacek for playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), Susan Sarandon for playing Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking (1995), Geoffrey Rush for playing David Helfgott in Shine (1996), Julia Roberts for playing Erin Brockovich in Erin Brockovich (2000), Jim Broadbent for playing John Bayley in Iris (2001/I) and most recently Helen Mirren for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006). (imdb.com)

Father of Maria Cooper. (imdb.com)

From 1938 to 1942 he earned $150,000 per picture. (imdb.com)

Named the #11 Greatest Actor on The 50 Greatest Screen Legends list by the American Film Institute (imdb.com)

Was very good friends with Ernest Hemingway for twenty years. Hemingway shot himself a month after Cooper's death. (imdb.com)

His income from his movies was: 1932 - $85,000, 1933 - $133,000, 1934 - $258,000, 1935 - $328,000, 1937 - $370,000 (imdb.com)

Howard Hawks directed him in three movies, Today We Live (1933), Ball of Fire (1941) and Sergeant York (1941). (imdb.com)

Appeared in four movies with Fay Wray, The First Kiss (1928), The Legion of the Condemned (1928), The Texan (1930), One Sunday Afternoon (1933). (imdb.com)

Turned down Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942). (imdb.com)

He turned down both Stagecoach (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939). (imdb.com)

He was originally supposed to play the leading role in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), but Harry Cohn refused to loan Cooper out so James Stewart was cast instead. (imdb.com)

Took an acting class from Michael Chekhov (imdb.com)

Turned down James Mason's role as an aging movie star falling on hard times in A Star Is Born (1954). (imdb.com)

In 1960, for the first time since his arrival in Hollywood, there were no new Gary Cooper pictures. In the spring of that year he underwent several operations for prostate cancer, but in the autumn managed to film one final movie in England, The Naked Edge (1961). (imdb.com)

In 1968 a "Variety" magazine poll of popular television personalities still included Cooper and his one-time rival Clark Gable, even though both actors had died nearly a decade earlier. (imdb.com)

Was considered for the role of Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch (1955). (imdb.com)

His mother Alice Cooper died in a Palm Desert convalescent home in October 1967, at the age of 94. His brother Arthur Cooper died in May 1982, at the age of 87. (imdb.com)

With the critical and commercial disaster You're in the Navy Now (1951), the word got out that Cooper was finished. He couldn't even sell a good picture that was a sure-fire formula to begin with - or once had been. He had disappeared completely from the Motion Picture Herald's annual survey of the top ten box office stars. He had been on the list for nine successive years, moving up and down but always there, proof that he was still a guarantee if only as a commodity star. Now he had lost even that. As the host of It's a Big Country (1951), Cooper got fabulous press coverage during filming but after a few engagements it was withdrawn out of embarrassment. It wasted a warehouse of first rate talent - Fredric March, William Powell, Gene Kelly, Ethel Barrymore, Janet Leigh, Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn and others. Cooper made another routine western, Distant Drums (1951), and then he made the picture which would prove to be an enormous comeback vehicle for him - High Noon (1952). (imdb.com)

His reputation as an unthinking conservative seems largely undeserved. Though he appeared as a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, he carefully avoided naming any people he suspected of having Communist sympathies within the Hollywood community. He later starred in High Noon (1952), a western that was an allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, and strongly defended blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman from attacks by the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Foreman later credited Cooper as the only major star in Hollywood who tried to help him. His mistress Patricia Neal, who did consider herself a liberal, said Gary was "conservative" but "you couldn't call him right-wing". Cooper showed a sense of humor by asking John Wayne to collect his Oscar for him in 1953, after Wayne had criticized High Noon (1952) as "anti-American". (imdb.com)

He was a conservative Republican. He voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and for Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932. He actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie in 1940, strongly believing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt should serve no more than two terms of office, and endorsed Thomas E. Dewey in 1944. (imdb.com)

Has starred in a total number of 20 westerns, 3 of those were silent. (imdb.com)

His lovers included Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Carole Lombard, Lupe Velez, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Patricia Neal. Sir Cecil Beaton also claimed to have had an affair with him. (imdb.com)

Has played six real life characters on screen. Wild Bill Hickok, Marco Polo, Sgt. Alvin C. York, Lou Gehrig, Dr. Commander Corydon M. Wassell and Gen. Billy Mitchell. (imdb.com)

In the late 1950s, his voracious eating habits finally caught up with him. After decades of incomparable thinness, Cooper put on 15 lbs, pushing his weight up to 190 lbs, which on his 6'3" frame was still slender. (imdb.com)

Met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a luncheon organized by Charles Feldman at Twentieth Century Fox on 19 September 1959. Kruschev personally invited Cooper and his wife and daughter on a six-day, United States Information Agency-sponsored trip to Moscow and Leningrad. After Cooper entertained some Soviet dignitaries at his house in Hollywood, Hedda Hopper publicly denounced him as "soft on Commies". (imdb.com)

Along with Sidney Poitier, he is the most represented actor on the American Film Institute's 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time, with five of his films on the list. They are: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) at #83, Sergeant York (1941) at #57, Meet John Doe (1941) at #49, High Noon (1952) at #27 and The Pride of the Yankees (1942) at #22. (imdb.com)

In 1932 he was named as a supporter and benefactor of a right-wing organization known as the Hollywood Light Horse, which described itself as "a military organization formed to promote Americanism and combat Communism and radicalism subversive to Constitutional government", and which numbered English actor Victor McLaglen as one of its members. The assertion that Cooper was an active supporter was quickly withdrawn following protests by his representatives. (imdb.com)

Is mentioned in the Irving Berlin song "Puttin' On The Ritz" (performe by Taco) and in the song "La derrière séance" by Eddy Mitchell. (imdb.com)

Frank Capra directed him in two movies, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1941). (imdb.com)

He was very popular with audiences over a long period of time, his popularity exceeding that of "The King" Clark Gable himself at the box office. Named the #1 Box Office Star of 1953 in the Top 10 Poll of Money-Making Stars, as ranked by Quigley Publications' annual survey of movie exhibitors. He made the list 18 times from 1936 to 1957, which was a record when he died in 1961. Of his contemporaries, John Wayne (who accepted Cooper's 1952 Best Actor Oscar for High Noon (1952)) established the still-standing record of Box Office success with 25 appearances in the Top 10 between 1949 and 1974. (imdb.com)

Was the original visual basis for pulp hero Doc Savage. (imdb.com)

Starred in two movies with Teresa Wright, The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and Casanova Brown (1944). (imdb.com)

Along with actress Mylène Demongeot, Cooper set in motion the first escalator to be installed in a cinema, at the Rex Theatre in Paris on June 7 1957. (imdb.com)

In 1951 he organized his own production company once more, calling it Baroda and buying the film rights to Alfred Hayes's best-selling novel "The Girl on the Via Flaminia". He paid $40,000 for the rights, and $10,000 to Hayes for a screenplay. He wanted to star in it with the young Montgomery Clift, the most popular young actor in Hollywood and also one of the best. Cooper could not arrange financing but broke even on his investment by selling the property to Leland Hayward and Anatole Litvak with the stipulation that Clift would have to star in it. The film was never made. Litvak, however, eventually made a film of The Chase (1966) much later, with Marlon Brando in the sheriff role that was being talked about in 1950 as Cooper's likely stage debut. John Hodiak took the role in Horton Foote's play when Cooper was unable to clear time with Warner Brothers - if indeed he tried. (imdb.com)

He was voted the 18th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly. (imdb.com)

Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1966. (imdb.com)

He formed his own production company, Baroda Productions, in 1958. In 1959 the company made three of his more unusual films: The Hanging Tree (1959), They Came to Cordura (1959) and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). (imdb.com)

Often cited James Stewart as his closest friend. (imdb.com)

In May 1931, after finishing I Take This Woman (1931), the combination of exhaustion, physical illness, and the conflict between his possessive mother and jealous mistress led to a nervous breakdown. He had been working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, sometimes twenty-three, making one film by day and another by night. He suffered from anemia and jaundice, and his weight dropped thirty pounds to a dangerously low 148 lbs. (imdb.com)

He was a close friend and admirer of Pablo Picasso. (imdb.com)

Turned down Joel McCrea's role in the Cecil B. DeMille epic Union Pacific (1939). (imdb.com)

He was fond of dogs, at various times he owned boxers, Dobermans and Great Danes. He and his wife also raised Sealyhams. (imdb.com)

Appeared in three movies with Barbara Stanwyck, Ball of Fire (1941), Meet John Doe (1941) and Blowing Wild (1953). (imdb.com)