Gary Cooper's famous stiff walk came from a botched cure for a hip injury
At 15, Frank Cooper hurt his hip in a car crash, and a doctor prescribed horseback riding on the family ranch. The therapy left him with an off-kilter gait and a tilted seat in the saddle. Both became part of the laconic screen hero who later won two Best Actor Oscars as Gary Cooper.
He was born in Helena, Montana, on 7 May 1901, the younger son of English immigrants. His father, from Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire, was a lawyer and rancher who rose to the Montana Supreme Court. In 1906 the family bought the Seven-Bar-Nine, a 600-acre cattle ranch north of Helena, where the boys learned to ride, hunt and fish. Their mother wanted them schooled in Britain, so from 1909 to 1912 they studied at Dunstable Grammar School, where young Frank coped with the discipline but never got used to the stiff Eton collars.
Art, not acting, was his first ambition. Charles Marion Russell's Western paintings inspired him, he took art courses in Bozeman in 1920, and at Grinnell College in Iowa he drew for the yearbook while failing to get into the drama club. He left Grinnell abruptly in February 1924, sold editorial cartoons to a Helena paper, then followed his parents to Los Angeles that November.
There, friends from Montana were riding in cheap Westerns on Poverty Row. Cooper, hoping to fund an art course, took extra work at five dollars a day and stunt riding at ten. He found the stunts tough and cruel to horses and riders alike, paid for his own screen test and hired Nan Collins as his agent. Because other actors already used the name Frank Cooper, she suggested Gary, after her home town in Indiana, and he liked it at once. In June 1926 Samuel Goldwyn signed him for 50 dollars a week.
Sound made him a star with the title role in The Virginian in 1929. Over 36 years he led 84 feature films, shifting from Western hero to defender of ordinary people in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. He won Best Actor for Sergeant York and High Noon, received an honorary Oscar in 1961 and died that May. The American Film Institute ranks him eleventh among screen legends.
Source: Gary Cooper
