James Cagney

One of Hollywood's preeminent male stars of all time, James Cagney was an American actor, dancer and film director. He won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances including the Academy Award for his role in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Cagney is remembered for playing multifaceted tough guys in films such as The Public Enemy (1931), Taxi! (1932), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), City for Conquest (1940) and White Heat (1949). In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked him eighth on its list of greatest male stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Orson Welles described him as "maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera".^[6]