James Cagney was one of the most important and influential screen actors of the twentieth century. During the 1930s Cagney helped create the popular image of the gangster in a series of critically acclaimed movies. After World War II, Cagney redefined the image in the film White Heat, playing a violent and demented killer beset with psychological problems. Off the screen, Cagney's support of left-wing causes in the 1930s and 1940s raised the ire of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, who had his agents closely monitor the actor for many years.

Cagney, the son of an bartender, was born on July 17, 1899, in New York City. Growing up on the Lower East Side, Cagney was a street smart young man who yearned to go on stage as a song-and-dance man. He toured the United States on the vaudeville circuit in the 1920s with his wife...