Quotes About Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper Quotations Page

About Cooper

"Some people are just nice guys and nothing, not even Hollywood, can change it."
--- Actor Richard Arlen

"Gary Cooper, for his many memorable screen performances and the international recognition he, as an individual, has gained for the motion picture industry."
--- Honorary Oscar, presented 1961

"We're all very proud of you, Coop. All of us are tremendously proud."
--- Actor James Stewart, accepting the honorary Oscar for Cooper in 1961

"You're positive he's going to ruin your picture. I froze in my tracks the first time I directed him. I thought something was wrong with him, and I saw a million dollar production go glimmering. I was amazed at the results on the screen. What I thought was underplaying turned out to be just the right approach. On the screen he's perfect, yet on the set you'd swear it's the worst job of acting in the history of motion pictures."
--- Director Sam Wood

"He is one of the most beloved illiterates this country has ever known."
--- Poet Carl Sandburg

"He had the soul of a boy--a pure, simple, nice, warm boys' soul... He was the incarnation of the honorable American."
--- Stockholm, Sweden newspaper Svenska Dagbladet

"I'm not good enough for him, I know that. But I tried to make him happy. I did make him happy. I would have done anything in the world for him. His mother--I hope she never cries the tears that I have cried. I hope she never knows the suffering I have known. I don't hate her, that much. She said I wasn't good enough for Gary. She told him that when I was in New York, I was seeing other men. She told him that I wasn't faithful to him. He believed what she told him."
--- Actress Lupe Velez

"The qualities that made Cooper a great star had little to do with acting."
--- Writer Brendan Gill

"He was a poet of the real. He knew all about cows, bulls, cars, and ocean tides. He had the enthusiasm of a boy. He could always tell you his first vivid impression of a thing. He had an old-fashioned politeness, but he said nothing casually."
--- Poet Clifford Odetts

"Coop never fought, he never got mad, he never told anybody off that I know of. Everybody that worked with him liked him."
--- Actor Joel McCrea

"I liked Gary very much, but you know...He was a doll, he really was, a very nice guy...Gary was very nice, but the women were so crazy about him. More than any other man I knew. I think what attracted people was he had a great shyness, he kept pulling back, and it intrigued people. He really was a very quiet, quiet guy."
--- Actress Evelyn Brent

"His death left a void no other actor can fill."
--- Gary Cooper biographer Homer Dickens

Reviews of Cooper's Movies

"Perhaps with him there is ended a certain America: that of the frontier and of innocence which had or was believed to have an exact sense of the dividing line between good and evil."
--- Rome newspaper Corriere Della Sera

"He was the symbol of trust, confidence and protection. He is dead now. What a miracle that he existed."
--- Hamburg newspaper Die Welt

"Cooper is a tall youth, with a boyish smile and enough swagger to give him character. Arizona Bound will give him a respectable introduction to his future public."
--- Variety review of Arizona Bound (1927)

"Gary Cooper, as Blythe, gives a fine performance. He is a sincere and manly lover. I have never seen him to better advantage."
--- Marquis Busby, film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, reviewing Lilac Time (1928)

"Mr. Gary Cooper is everything he should be as the Virginian--strong, attractive and serious, without being over-solemn."
--- London Times review of the Virginian (1929)

"He constantly underplays his roles, with the result that you frequently feel that he is injuring the production, and yet he is so attractive a player and, in his later emotional scenes, so enormously real and honest, that you realize in the end how helpful he has been."
--- New York Herald reviewer Richard Watts, Jr., on Seven Days Leave (1930)

"The understandably popular Gary Cooper, who underacts more completely than any other player within memory, never has been as effective and certainly never as expert an actor as he is in the role of the hero."
--- New York Herald reviewer Richard Watts, Jr., on Morocco (1930)

"Gary Cooper, particularly in the closing scenes, is revealed as an actor with a greater emotional depth than he has ever displayed before."
--- Brooklyn Daily Eagle film reviewer Martin Dickstein on A Farewell to Arms (1932)

"It seems a little astonishing to find this player of many formal leading man roles suddenly blossoming into a very human character, as though he has been playing home-spun people all his life. Cooper has for years been playing a procession of stuffed-shirt polite roles and somehow giving them a human touch that they didn't intrinsically have, by virtue of some subtlety, awkward masculinity, suppressed in polite roles, but vaguely sensed."
--- Variety magazine review of One Sunday Afternoon (1933)

"Gangling Gary Cooper, every long inch an officer, stalks strikingly through both comic and tragic sequences."
--- New York American review of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

"Cooper is a subtle and sure player who knows the value of restraint and is artist enough to employ it."
--- New York Evening Post film reviewer Thornton Delehanty on Desire

"For deftness and sheer likeability there is no actor on the screen today who can turn in a more satisfying performance."
--- New York Evening Post film reviewer Thornton Delehanty on Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

"Gary Cooper turns another corner in a career which has slowly developed him from a wooden-faced hero of horse-operas into a sensitive player with a reticent but wholly American wit."
--- Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger film reviewer Henry T. Murdock on Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

"Mr. Cooper always manages to suggest that his innocence conceals both intelligence and sincerity, so he contrives to give to this innocent part a touch of more reasonable and genuine heroism than it would normally have."
--- London Times review of The General Died at Dawn (1936)

"Gary Cooper acts Wild Bill Hickok with considerable force, humor and salty flavor."
--- New York World-Telegram review of The Plainsman (1936)

"Mr. Cooper's [Cole] Hardin is excellently done in this actor's easy, laconic style. Mr. Cooper is an economical player who can accomplish much with the flicker of an expression."
--- Christian Science Monitor film reviewer John Beaufort on The Westerner (1940)

"Gary Cooper plays the Texas Ranger with all the ease and charm and dry humor that have made him one of the cinema's outstanding leading men.
--- New York World-Telegram review of North West Mounted Police (1940)

"While [director Frank] Capra has never been more knowing and sincere in his direction, he has had invaluable support from Gary Cooper in the central role. The part was hand-tailored for the actor, but he does much more than just fit it. He gives a splendid and utterly persuasive portrayal. Only Cooper, I believe, could have so completely fulfilled Capra's conception."
--- New York Herald-Tribune film reviewer Howard Barnes on Meet John Doe (1940)

"[T]he performance of Gary Cooper in the title role holds the picture together magnificently."
--- New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther on Sergeant York (1941)

"Suffice it to say that it is one of extraordinary versatility and conviction. Whether he is being the gangling hell-raiser of the opening sequences, the hard-working fanatic of the middle portion, or the shrewd fighter of the Argonne section, he is always utterly right in the part."
--- New York Herald-Tribune film reviewer Howard Barnes on Sergeant York

"Mr. Cooper has seldom been better than he is as [Lou] Gehrig. His performance grows, as the character grows, from shy gawky undergraduate to modest, unassuming hero of millions."
--- New York World-Telegram review of The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

"There is something about the sadness that appears in Mr. Cooper's eyes, something about the slowness and the weariness of his walk, something about his manner that is not necessarily in the script which reminds the middle-aged observer that Mr. Cooper has been at it a long time."
--- New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther on Dallas (1951)

"Gary Cooper, who has stalked desperadoes down many a deserted cowtown street, never took a more effective stroll."
--- The New Yorker film reviewer John McCarten on High Noon (1952)

"Gary Cooper as the loving and loved Quaker husband and father has never more aptly utilized his great American face, nor acted more ably."
--- Films in Review review of Friendly Persuasion (1956)

"Not only does he still ride as if a horse taught him, but he also mops up the prairie in one of the meanest fist-scrounging duels we've seen in years."
--- New York Times film reviewer Howard Thompson on Man of the West (1958)

"Cooper has one of his best roles. His mystery and tight-lipped refusal to discuss it [his past] perfectly suit his laconic style."
--- Variety review of The Hanging Tree (1959)

"Naked Edge, the whodunit that is the late Gary Cooper's last picture, is a waste of a good man."
--- Time magazine review of The Naked Edge (1961)

Cooper on Cooper

"I looked it at like this way. To get folks to like you, as a screen player I mean, I figured you had to sort of be their ideal. I don't mean a handsome knight riding a white horse, but a fella who answered the description of a right guy."
--- Gary Cooper

"Nan (Collins, a studio casting director) came from Gary, Indiana, and suggested I adopt that name. She felt it was more exciting than Frank. I figured I'd give it a try. Good thing she didn't come from Poughkeepsie."
--- Gary Cooper

"The only achievement I am really proud of is the friends I have made in this community."
--- Gary Cooper

"If you want to call me that, smile."
--- A frequently misquoted Gary Cooper to Walter Huston in The Virginian (1929)

"I liked the role because...I was portraying a good, sound American character."
--- Cooper on his role in Sergeant York (1941)