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Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper's rugged mug, soft-spoken demeanor and earnest, haunted eyes for decades made him the quintessential lonely American of motion pictures, a more stoic, human protagonist versus boisterous, bigger-than-life Hollywood supermen. Privately a debonair ladies' man with a taste for high society, he crafted an image as just the opposite, from his prototype cowboy talkie "The Virginian" (1929) playing shy, stoic "aw-shucks" heroes. He built that image in such classics as Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936) and "Meet John Doe" (1941) and celebrated biopics like "Sergeant York" (1941) and "Pride of the Yankees" (1942). Though he cooperated with the U.S. government's Hollywood witch hunts early in the Cold War, he nevertheless made a triumphant comeback in the anti-blacklisting parable "High Noon" (1952), refusing to dissociate himself from the film's blacklisted writer, Carl Foreman.