Born Frank James Cooper to British-born parents, he spent his early years on a ranch in Montana until his mother took him and his older brother to England in 1910. After seven years, Cooper returned to the USA, attended college and eventually joined his family in Los Angeles. Arriving as an aspiring 23-year-old cartoonist, he began appearing as an extra and stunt rider in Westerns after failing to impress the newspapers with his artwork. On the advice of a casting director (later his agent), he changed his first name to "Gary" (after the Indiana city) and got his big break, a pivotal role in "The Winning of Barbara Worth" (1926), supporting Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. The film's producer, Samuel Goldwyn, offered him a contract for $65 per week, but Cooper instead signed with Paramount for the much higher salary of $150 per week. Soon he was starring in oaters like "Arizona Bound", "Nevada" and "The Last Outlaw" (all 1927), but it was a featured part in that year's "Wings", one of the most famous silent films of all time, that really triggered an onslaught of fan mail. The studio eased him in front of a microphone for the final scenes of "The Shopworn Girl" (1928), and his voice recorded well. By the early 1930s his exceptional good looks and slow, thoughtful delivery was endearing him to film fans the world over as Paramount matched him against a bevy of beauties: Marlene Dietrich ("Morocco" 1930), Carole Lombard ("I Take This Woman" 1931), Claudette Colbert ("His Woman" 1931) and Tallulah Bankhead ("Devil and the Deep" 1932).

Cooper struck a lasting friendship with the writer Ernest Hemingway, playing the first of his detached Hemingway heroes in "A Farewell to Arms" (1932), opposite Helen Hayes. As he embarked on his first of seven films with Hathaway ("Now and Forever" 1934), he was about to enter a period where almost all his films were exceptional. His Best Actor Oscar nomination as the multi-millionaire trying to give away his inheritance in Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936) attests to his facility for comedy, but there was always a Western around the corner like DeMille's "The Plainsman" (1937) or William Wyler's "The Westerner" (1940) for him to inhabit. Though he was a perfect fit with the cowboy iconography, Cooper also possessed a chameleon quality that enabled him to be equally adept in a remarkably varied oeuvre. Make him the hero and put him in any walk of life, and he could embody that interpretation of the American Dream. He won his first Oscar as "Sergeant York" (1941), the most decorated US serviceman of World War I, worked hard to overcome his unfamiliarity with baseball to give an excellent, Oscar-nominated performance as Lou Gehrig in "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942) and slipped readily back into the skin of a Hemingway character for another Oscar-nominated turn in the Spanish Civil War tale, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943).

In one of his last films for Paramount, Cooper made a credible nuclear physicist caught up in espionage for Fritz Lang's "Cloak and Dagger" (1946), and though many thought him miscast as the idealistic architect of "The Fountainhead" (1949), women responded strongly to his rugged individualism, especially the sight of him bare-chested in the quarry. The peak of his career having passed, he found himself in the doldrums at Warner Bros., but there remained at least one last, great defining part ahead. 'Coop' took a cut in salary in exchange for a percentage of the profits on Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon" (1952), marking the beginning of big star participation in movie-making. He delivered a magnificently understated performance as the middle-aged sheriff who must fight one more battle before retirement, earning universal acclaim and the second Best Actor Academy Award of his career. Of his subsequent movies, Wyler's "Friendly Persuasion" (1956) probably showed him to best advantage as a Quaker drawn reluctantly into the Civil War, though Anthony Mann's "Man of the West" (1958), dismissed at the time, has more recently gained in reputation. In his last years, Cooper made minor films, dying of cancer in May 1961, shortly after receiving an honorary Oscar for his contributions to the industry.