James Cagney, spent most of his early life in Manhattan's upper east side.
A large number of the people in his neighbourhood were Jewish, and subsequently he could speak fluent Yiddish, a line or two of which he sometimes used in some of his films such as Taxi (1932). His father was James Cagney, Sr., a dark haired Irish-American. His mother, Carrie Nelson, was the redheaded daugher of a Norwegian tugboat captain.

Cagney worked several odd jobs during his youth and attended Columbia University for six months. He dropped out to go back to work when his father died.
He entered show business just after World War 1. A fellow employee at Wanamakers told him a troupe of vaudevillians where auditioning singers and dancers, and paying $35 a week. Cagney auditioned, and although he could neither sing or dance, he got the job!

Cagney stayed in vaudeville until 1929, when he moved to Broadway to star with Joan Blondell in 'Penny Arcade'. This got him and Blondell an offer to go to Hollywood for screen tests. Cagney got his break in films when Al Jolson recommended him for a part in the upcoming movie Sinner's Holiday (1930). Jolson had seen him in the same part on the stage and had liked him in it. Warner Brother's signed him up for the movie and he remained with that studio until the early 1940's.

Soon after this Cagney got his first paid part in the theatre, that of a chorus girl in the all male Every Sailor. For this part he had to learn how to dance and from that time on he considered himself a song and dance man. The next part he got was in the Broadway show Pitter Patter (1920) where he met his future wife Willard (Billie) Vernon, a chorus girl from Iowa. They were married on September 28, 1922. During their early years together they often toured the Vaudeville circuit, sometimes together, sometimes not.

His first big, sucessful part in the cinema was that of Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931). After this, he continued to make a series of gangster films, always playing the tough guy. In 1934 he got to play a rough and tumble sailor in Here Comes the Navy, the first of nine movies he made with his close friend Pat O'Brien. The most popular of the movies they made together was Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), where Cagney plays a bad guy sent to the electric chair for murder.

Cagney got to break out of his tough guy image when he played song and dance man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1941), a role which won him his only Oscar. He later repeated this role in the 1955 movie The Seven Little Foys, which starred Bob Hope as Eddie Foy. In 1949 Cagney made his last gangster movie, White Heat. In this film he plays a psychotic mama's boy. White Heat is largely remembered for its explosive ending.
After this he went on to star in such films as the musical The West Point Story (1950), the Navy film Mister Roberts (1955), Lon Chaney's film biography Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), and the postwar picture set in Germany One, Two, Three (1961).
After making One, Two, Three he decided to retire from acting. Cagney had always had a feeling for nature, so when he retired he had more time to do what he loved, such as sailing and raising horses. Painting and poetry writing were others of his much beloved hobbies.
He was called out of retirement in 1981 for the movie Ragtime, which also had in it his old friend Pat O'Brien.