To the top of the world, Ma

From street kid to movie star, James Cagney did it his way

Blame the Chicago hoodlum, Hymie Weiss. The story goes that Weiss had grown so sick of listening to his girlfriend endlessly yakking over the breakfast table that he once took an omelette she had just cooked and smeared it over her face. As he admits in his autobiography, Cagney On Cagney, James Cagney was thinking of Weiss when he was preparing for one of the most famous scenes in Public Enemy (1931). Mae Clarke was the unfortunate actress cast opposite him, and it was decided that an omelette would make too much of a mess. "So we used the grapefruit half."

In a film full of iconic moments, this was the one which registered most strongly with the public. There's an irony here. The red-haired, 32-year-old Irish-American who had spent most of the previous decade toiling away without reward in vaudeville (and had even served a stint as a female impersonator) became a huge star on the back of an act of misogynistic violence.

It's the flamboyance with which he performs his thuggish act which makes this such a quintessential Cagney moment. Conventional wisdom has it that screen acting should be subtle and restrained, that the camera has some uncanny way of registering hidden emotion. This was not a philosophy which Cagney ever espoused. He acted for the screen in the same ferocious way he had on stage. Nobody spoke dialogue louder or faster than he did.

He used his body in an equally expressionistic fashion. Think of the scene in Public Enemy in which the rival mob let rip with a machine gun as he and a friend walk down a street. Cagney leaps behind a wall with all the grace and speed of a dancer performing a tricky arabesque. When he died (as he invariably did in his gangster movies), he always went out in a blaze of glory. In The Roaring Twenties (1939), we see him fatally wounded, teetering down a snowy street before collapsing on the steps of a church. "What was his business?" a cop asks. "He used to be a big shot," comes the reply from his heartbroken girlfriend. In White Heat (1949), he's seen on top of a huge about-to-explode gas tank, yelling out "made it, ma! To the top of the world, ma!".

The wonder about Cagney is that he's able to sell audiences stunts that would seem like sheer bombast if performed by lesser actors. Orson Welles acknowledged Cagney's genius, remarking to Peter Bogdanovich: "Cagney was one of the biggest actors in the whole history of the screen. Force, style, truth and control - he had everything. He pulled no punches. God, how he projected. And yet nobody could call Cagney a ham."

At first, Cagney didn't take to film at all. "With my pale New York complexion I looked like a wraith," he wrote in his autobiography. He wasn't a natural movie star; he was neither tall nor especially good-looking. But he was pugnacious, with huge reserves of energy and attitude. His background helped: born in New York in 1899 to a Norwegian mother and a father who was a barman and alcoholic who died in his early forties, Cagney was a street brawler as a kid.

As he suggested to Rolling Stone in one of his last interviews before his death in 1986, he was part of a generation which started with nothing, but believed fervently in the American dream. "The whole nation was wide-open... so many professions, including film acting, were in their inception. You knew it was a chance to get a big stake that would not come again."

Once he reached Hollywood, critics realised Cagney was a new type of screen idol. A few months after the release of Public Enemy, Lincoln Kirstein, the writer, intellectual and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, wrote an essay about the young actor which pinpointed his appeal, calling him "the first definitely metropolitan figure to become national... representing not a minority in action, but the action of the American majority: the semi-literate lower middle-class... the American hero whom ordinary men and boys recognise as themselves."

Assessing his legacy isn't hard. Few other screen actors have come anywhere near his blazing pitch of intensity. As Malcolm McDowell recently put it: "he was the Laurence Olivier of screen acting. There is no one who will touch him - ever. End of story".

The James Cagney season is at the NFT, London SE1, throughout July