Some things you may not know about the man we're saluting as TCM's star of the month for January, the great Jimmy Cagney. In his early days in vaudeville he often worked as a female impersonator. (Huh? Jimmy Cagney?) Once a movie star, it was years before fans knew he had vivid red hair because all of his early films were photographed in black and white. It's one reason Cagney was earmarked, early on, to star in Warner Bros. 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, which was to be filmed in the newly-developed 3-strip Technicolor process. It would be the public's first glimpse of Cagney's carrot-top, set off against the lush greens of Sherwood Forest and his character's own green tights. But it was not to be; Errol Flynn would inherit the tights and Cagney wouldn't make his first appearance in a color film until four years later, with 1942's Captains of the Clouds (which we'll be showing on Jan. 23.) He photographed like a million up in those clouds yet it would be 10 years before he was seen in another color film.

Other films he was the first choice to star in: Paramount's Going My Way, which was called The Padre when Cagney nixed it, a role which went on to earn an Oscar® for the man who did play it, Bing Crosby. During Cagney's days as a Warner Bros. contractee (1932-42), he and fellow-rebel Bette Davis both turned down so many roles they became known as Warners' "King and Queen of Suspensions," each of them being suspended without pay every time they would refuse a part. But perhaps the biggest loss to moviegoers if not to the man himself was his turning down the role of Eliza Doolittle's rascally father Alfred P. Doolittle in the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady. That time it wasn't because Cagney didn't like the part but because he'd officially retired three years earlier and was making good a vow to never again set foot in front of a movie camera. It's the same reason he turned down the offer to play Vito Corleone in Paramount's 1972 The Godfather, even after he was given a blank check to write in any amount it would take for him to say "yes." (However, after 20 years of retirement, Cagney did surprise everyone by returning to the screen in Milos Forman's 1981 Ragtime.)

The one role Jimmy C. really did want and couldn't get was the lead in the 1940 biopic Knute Rockne, All American, about the Notre Dame coach of legend. Notre Dame's administration had a say in who'd play their famous football leader and said "no" to Cagney because of a stance he'd taken at the time on a controversial political matter. Amazing, the ones that got away, true, but even more bewildering is the volume and versatility of the work Cagney did do, and we'll be showing 37 of those films throughout the month.

Oh, yes, one more thing: never once in a movie did he ever say the line always credited to him: "You...dirty...rat!" The closest he ever came to it was in the 1932 movie Taxi, which we'll be showing on Jan. 16. What he does utter in that film, through gritted teeth, is "Come out and take it, you dirty yellow-bellied rat...," words no one could ever deliver with the same kind of staccato venom as Cagney. But then nobody could quite sing, dance or spout Shakespeare like him, either, all of which we'll be proving again and again every Wednesday this month. Do come join us.

by Robert Osborne