Jackie Cooper

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Jackie Cooper (1989)

Jackie Cooper (born September 15, 1922 in Los Angeles , California - † May 3, 2011 in Beverly Hills , Los Angeles County ) was an American actor and director . In 1931, at the age of nine, he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for the film Skippy . In adulthood he directed numerous television productions and played the role of Perry White in the Superman films.

Live and act

Jackie Cooper was born as John Cooper Jr. to the Italian-American pianist Mabel Leonard Bigelow. His father, John Cooper Sr., left the family when he was just two years old. As the nephew of the film director Norman Taurog , he had good contacts in the film industry and made his first films at an early age. Cooper first attracted attention in 1929 through his appearances in the short film comedies The Little Rascals by comedy producer Hal Roach . With the little rascals he quickly became one of the leading actors through his energetic appearances. In Teacher's Pet (1930), for example, he played a student who is in love with his new teacher. Teacher's Pet earned him the attention of the MGM producers , who hired him from Roach and used him as the lead in the children's film Skippy (1931). However, the shooting of Skippy didn't go particularly well: Skippy's director , his uncle Norman Taurog, made Cooper cry for one scene by tricking him into shooting his dog. Cooper's tears in the film were therefore real. In view of this incident, he named his 1982 autobiography Please Don't Shoot My Dog .

By Skippy Cooper was the youngest actor ever for one for almost 50 years of Oscar nomination. This record was only to be broken in 1980 by the eight-year-old Justin Henry ( Kramer versus Kramer ) . However, Justin Henry was nominated for Best Supporting Role and Cooper for Best Actor. In the following years, Cooper was one of the biggest child stars in Hollywood. Jackie Cooper played leading roles in numerous films of the 1930s, with his characters mostly self-confident and furious, but at the same time touching. That earned him the nickname America's Boy . Cooper made the four films The Champ (1931), The Bowery (1933), Treasure Island (1934) and O'Shaughnessy's Boy (1935) with film star Wallace Beery . At a young age he played a gang member in Fritz Lang's western Revenge for Jesse James (1940) and appeared alongside Judy Garland and James Stewart in Girls in the Spotlight (1941).

For a long time after his deployment in World War II, he only received offers for B-film productions. From the 1950s he was able to celebrate smaller successes again as a leading actor in television sitcoms such as The People's Choice and Hennesey . He has also had guest roles in numerous television series, such as a murderous politician in an episode of the crime series Columbo . It wasn't until 1978 that Cooper returned to the big screen in a major Hollywood production when he took on the role of editor-in-chief Perry White in the four Superman films starring Christopher Reeve . Since the early 1960s, he began - in addition to acting - to work as a producer and director for television series. In the 1970s and 1980s in particular, he worked as a director for successful series such as M * A * S * H and Detective Rockford - just give us a call . He received an Emmy Award for Best Director of a TV Series in 1974 and 1979 . In the late 1980s, Cooper retired from the entertainment industry.

After two divorced marriages, Cooper was married to Barbara Rae Kraus in third marriage from 1954 until her death in 2009. He had four children. At the beginning of May 2011, at the age of 88, he died in a hospital in Beverly Hills after a brief illness. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated to him.

Filmography (selection)

As an actor

As a director

Autobiography

  • Please don't shoot my dog. The Autobiography of Jackie Cooper , New York: Penguin Putnam 1982 - ISBN 0-425-07483-8 .

Web links

Commons : Jackie Cooper  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Jackie Cooper dies at 88; child star in the 1930s (Los Angeles Times obituary)
  2. cf. Legendary Actor Jackie Cooper Dies at 88  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at baltimoresun.com, May 4, 2011 (accessed May 5, 2011).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.baltimoresun.com