Gary Cooper

This definitive biography of a Hollywood icon portrays Gary Cooper as a man of complex and sophisticated tastes, as well as large appetites.

A surprising portrait of Gary Cooper, based on authoritative Hollywood sources, reveals his career, personal life, and more.

One of the greatest movie stars ever, Gary Cooper set the standard for the strong, silent type in a career that spanned from the Hollywood's Silents to the Golden Age. Films like High Noon and Sergeant York made Cooper famous, but his private life was just as legendary. This book pulls back the curtain on the life and legacy of this American icon.

Published to coincide with his centennial in May 2001, this definitive biography of a Hollywood icon portrays actor Gary Cooper as a man of complex and sophisticated tastes, as well as large appetites. Meyers offers a riveting, inside look at Cooper's career; his tempestuous relationships with Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Tallulah Bankhead; and his legendary friendship with Ernest Hemingway.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Searchers, the revelatory story behind the classic movie High Noon and the toxic political climate in which it was created. It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just thirty-two days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favorite film, celebrating moral fortitude. Yet what has been often overlooked is that High Noon was made during the height of the Hollywood blacklist, a time of political inquisition and personal betrayal. In the middle of the film shoot, screenwriter Carl Foreman was forced to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his former membership in the Communist Party. Refusing to name names, he was eventually blacklisted and fled the United States. (His co-authored screenplay for another classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, went uncredited in 1957.) Examined in light of Foreman's testimony, High Noon's emphasis on courage and loyalty takes on deeper meaning and importance. In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel tells the story of the making of a great American Western, exploring how Carl Foreman's concept of High Noon evolved from idea to first draft to final script, taking on allegorical weight. Both the classic film and its turbulent political times emerge newly illuminated.

'Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight.' On screen he was the ultimate all-American hero: lean, laconic and masculine, a lone sheriff battling his enemies in High Noon, or a tough individualist in The Fountainhead. Off screen he bedded a host of leading ladies and carefully honed his image, making hundreds of movies and winning two Oscars in the process. Acclaimed film writer David Thomson explores the career and the contradictions of 'Coop', the star who lived the dream in the golden age of Hollywood.

In the autumn of 1940, two icons of American culture met in Sun Valley, Idaho--writer Ernest Hemingway and actor Gary Cooper. Although "Hem" was known as brash, larger-than-life and hard-drinking and "Coop" as courteous, non-confrontational and taciturn, the two became good friends. And though they would see each other over the years in Hollywood, Cuba, New York and Paris, it was to Idaho they always returned. Here they hunted together, waded through marshes and hiked sagebrush-covered hills, sometimes talking and sometimes not but continually forging a close comradeship. That bond sustained them through the highs and lows of stardom, through personal trials and triumphs and from their first conversation to their deaths seven weeks apart in 1961. Author Larry Morris celebrates the story of that unforgettable friendship.