The actor Orson Welles called “the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera”
Remarkably, Orson Welles hadn’t even wanted to go to Hollywood to make his masterpiece debut movie Citizen Kane, but when he was given an offer too good to turn down, he arrived in the centre of the American film industry and set about making one of the greatest movies ever.
Of course, Welles had originally been a man of radio and theatre. Cinema was a long afterthought of his creative ambitions, but following the acclaim of Citizen Kane, he established himself as an auteur movie director, leading to further efforts with The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai and The Trial.
Suddenly, as a key figure in Hollywood, Welles familiarised himself with some of the greatest actors of the 20th century. We know well that Welles admires the likes of Joseph Cotton and John Wayne, but they paled in insignificance next to the star who Welles had considered the very best, the one, the only, James Cagney.
Speaking in an interview with Michael Parkinson, Welles had gushed of Cagney, “Cagney in my view was maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of the camera.” Cagney possessed a deep versatility that helped to announced himself as a Hollywood legend, from his early tough guy roles in The Public Enemy and Angels with Dirty Faces to his singing and dancing effort in the musical film Yankee Doodle Dandy.
What was most impressive about Cagney for Welles was the fact that he “broke every rule about movie acting.” According to the iconic film director, when most stage actors arrive on a movie set for the first time, they say something like, “I learned to act to the camera because you have to do less. You can’t do what you do at the National Theatre.”
However, Cagney was different and “came on as though we were playing to an audience of 4500 people.” Welles explained that the New York City-born actor always “acted at the top of his bent and never hammed for one moment.” In fact, Welles felt that any sort of “hamming” in acting was “fakery”, and Cagney never delivered a single moment of fakery in his entire career, possessing an authenticity and intensity that afforded his status as one of the all-time greats of Hollywood.
Another thing that Welles found admirable in Cagney was that he eluded the kind of lifestyle of a famous Hollywood actor, preferring to keep himself to himself, even after his retirement. He goes out and does his thing. He goes to Hollywood for six months a year and sees his old cronies,” Welles explained. “But in all his life, he never went to a nightclub once. He was totally invisible.”
Early into his career, Cagney had performed as a vaudeville before getting his first major acting part in 1925. Eventually, Cagney delivered his fifth movie performance in The Public Enemy, which went on to become one of the greatest gangster movies of all time, and the actor doubled down in 1938 with an Academy Award nomination for Angels with Dirty Faces, an effort he superseded with his win for Yankee Doodle Dandy.
A true legend of Hollywood, Cagney earned the plaudits of his fans, the movie critics and his fellow industry figures alike, but few seemed to be blown away by his talents quite like the inimitable Orson Welles.
