James Cagney

James Cagney died of a heart attack while ill with diabetes in Stanfordville, New York at the age of 86 and is interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. Chakiris has also appeared on Broadway and television, and in the early 1960s embarked on a career as a pop singer which resulted in a couple of minor hit songs. The origin of this is from the 1931 film Taxi! where Cagney delivered the line "Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!" often misquoted as "Come out, you dirty rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!". His biggest success came with the film West Side Story (1961), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The stereotypical impression of James Cagney involves wearing a trenchcoat and a hat and sneering "You dirty rat!", a line he never said. He was one of the dancers in Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and also appeared as a dancer alongside Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas. As a tribute to the myriad talents and interests James Cagney had in life, his pallbearers included boxer Floyd Patterson, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, actor Ralph Bellamy, and film director Milos Forman. Chakiris made his film debut in 1947 and for several years he appeared in small roles, usually as a dancer or a member of the chorus in various musical films.

Cagney's health deteriorated substantially after 1979, and the role in Ragtime, as well as a later television appearance in 1984, was designed to aid in his convalescence. George Chakiris (born September 16, 1934 in Norwood, Ohio) is a dancer and film actor. In 1974 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Film Institute and in 1984 his friend Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. During this hiatus Cagney rebuffed all film offers, including a substantial one in My Fair Lady, to devote time to learning how to paint (at which he became very accomplished), and tending to his beloved farm in Stanfordville, New York. Cagney's final appearance on film was in Ragtime in 1981, capping a career that covered over seventy films, although his film prior to Ragtime had been in 1961 with One, Two, Three.

He was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild and president of the Guild from 1942-44. He went on to better things including Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), an Academy Award-winning role in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), White Heat (1949, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"), and Mister Roberts (1955). Cagney went on to star in numerous films, making his name as a 'tough guy' in a series of crime films such as The Public Enemy (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931) and Hard to Handle (1933). When Warner Brothers bought the film rights to the play Penny Arcade they took Cagney and his co-star Joan Blondell from the stage to the screen in Sinner's Holiday (1930).

He worked in vaudeville and on Broadway, marrying the dancer Frances Willard (aka: "Billie") Vernon on September 28, 1922. Born in Yonkers, New York, Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918. James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899–March 30, 1986) was an American film actor.