The one actor Alfred Hitchcock always wanted to work with: “Well suited to the type of film I like to make”
Filmmakers working with somebody once and then deciding they’d love nothing more than to do it again has been a standard practice in Hollywood since the dawn of the moving image, even if everybody knows that Alfred Hitchcock definitely had a type.
After casting Madeleine Carroll in 1935’s The 39 Steps, Hitchcock suddenly developed a taste for blonde femme fatales. It would become one of his defining traits, and he drafted in the fair-haired Clare Greet, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, and Vera Miles to appear in at least two of his pictures.
His repertory stretched well beyond the blondes, though, with the ‘Master of Suspense’ finding multiple roles in various films for Leo G Carroll, Donald Calthrop, Phyllis Konstam, Edmund Gwenn, John Longden, and many more. When it came to his leading men, there were only two that Hitchcock returned to more than any other.
Cary Grant starred in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest, with Jimmy Stewart proving perfectly suited to the auteur’s sensibilities in Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. However, Hitchcock would have loved to add another ‘Golden Age’ icon to that number, only for them to become the ultimate one who got away.
“I should like to direct Gary Cooper,” he told Film Weekly as far back as 1939. “He is an actor well suited to the type of film I like to make. Cooper has that rare faculty of being able to rivet the attention of an audience while he does nothing. In that respect, he is very much like the late Gerald du Maurier, who could walk on stage, flick a speck of dust off his shoulder, study his fingernails for a whole five minutes, and do it all so dramatically and with such accurate timing that he held an audience spellbound.”
This was the year before Hitchcock had even made his American debut with Rebecca, and he was already dreaming of collaborating with Cooper. Despite repeated attempts over the years, the Academy Award-winning legend remained perennially out of his grasp regardless of how many overtures were made.
MGM optioned the literary adaptation The Wreck of the Mary Deare, with designs on having Hitchcock direct and Cooper star, but only the latter remained when it made it onto screens in 1959 in what turned out to be his penultimate credit, which wasn’t the first time they passed like ships in the night.
Cooper turned down the chance to lead Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, and he was at the top of the director’s casting wish list for The Paradine Case, so it certainly seemed like a one-sided love affair. Hitchcock would spend another four decades directing after first signalling his desire to work with Cooper, but he still didn’t get the chance to make it happen.
