Trivia of Gary Cooper

Trivia of Gary Cooper

*He was originally a painter and artist and had sought to pursue that as a career. His drawings and water colors were exhibited throughout the dormitory in college, and he was named art editor for the college yearbook. In fact, he started work as an extra with the intention of making money to attend an art course.He never intended to become an actor and only began after meeting two friends from Montana when he first came to Los Angeles and, after working a series of odd jobs, was set up with a casting director who gave him work as an extra for five dollars a day and a rider for twice that amount. His intention was to save up enough for an Art course.

*He was in a car accident as a teenager that caused him to walk with a limp the rest of his life.

*In 1944 he formed his own production company, International Pictures, with Samuel Goldwyn. His partners were Leo Spitz, William Goetz (who'd recently been ousted from 20th Century-Fox) and Nunnally Johnson. They only produced nine movies, two of which starred Cooper, Casanova Brown (1944) and Along Came Jones (1945). Then in 1946 they sold International Pictures to Universal Pictures, which changed its name to Universal-International.

*At first Cooper didn't want to make Friendly Persuasion (1956), not just because he felt the audience wouldn't accept him as a devout Quaker, but also because he did not want to play a father figure. This was despite the fact that he was now 55. On the set he arranged for his daughter Maria Cooper Janis to date Anthony Perkins.

*He blew the harmonica and strummed the guitar; played backgammon and bridge; grew corn and avocados on the Encino ranch he bought in the early 1930s and loved to work with his tractor in the garden.

*His appetite was prodigious, but no matter how much he ate, he always remained thin. During his early years in Hollywood, working odd jobs and living with his parents, he said, he said with some comic exaggeration, that his "starvation diet at the time ran to no less than a dozen eggs a day, a couple of loaves of bread, a platter of bacon, and just enough pork chops between meals to keep me going until I got home for supper." His specialty on hunting trips was gargantuan: wild duck covered with bacon strips, enhanced by four eggs and steak. He could eat a cherry pie and drink a quart of milk for lunch.

*He was a close friend and admirer of Pablo Picasso.Also good friends with Ernest Hemingway for 20 years. Hemingway shot himself a month after Cooper's death.