Cagney.

John McCabe Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95, 439 pp.

It may be some while before biographies of urban Irish-Americans from impoverished families escape the long shadow of Frank McCourt's 1996 memoir, Angela's Ashes, which has apparently won millions of readers over to its central claim: "nothing can compare with the Irish version" of a deprived childhood. Yet if James Cagney's early film career is any indication, Hollywood had reached the same conclusion more than six decades earlier, when the street-toughened New York Irishman became virtually synonymous with urban pathology in films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Cagney himself struggled for decades against such typecasting, in his life as well as his art. As John McCabe shows in the celebrity biography Cagney, the actor's most brutal film roles still conveyed a sympathetic dimension that moviegoers found highly appealing.

The "shiftless loquacious alcoholic father" of Angela's Ashes is present in Cagney as well, in the person of James Francis Cagney, a sometime barkeep who moved his growing family from Manhattan's East Village (where his second son, James Cagney, Jr., was born in 1899), to Yorkville, on the Upper East Side. Years later Cagney poignantly recalled that his father bore an "incredible resemblance" to Jackie Gleason, but his "funny roaring" led only to death at age forty-one. McCabe's narrative, however, eschews the lugubrious Angela's Ashes model in favor of a much more upbeat trajectory; a sensible choice in light of the success ethic instilled in the five surviving Cagney children by their Irish-Norwegian mother. Two of his brothers became physicians, and Cagney himself briefly studied at Columbia University before his theatrical gifts were unwrapped in 1918 in the drama program at the Lenox Hill Settlement House.

McCabe, a professional actor and theater educator, vividly portrays the vaudeville milieu which provided Cagney the vehicle to develop his imposing gifts for dance and physical comedy. In 1922 he married Frances Willard "Willie" Vernon, a chorus girl he met while appearing in "Ritz Girls of 19 and 22." Following a stint running a dance school with Willie in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Cagney returned to the stage and was "discovered" by film mogul Jack Warner playing a bootlegger in Penny Arcade. Cagney traveled to Hollywood in 1930 and appeared in Sinner's Holiday for Warner Brothers. He went on to star in over sixty films before retiring in 1961.

Cagney exceeds the typical standards of celebrity biography because McCabe is fully attentive to the many dimensions of his subject's artistry. He isolates a shot from Cagney's first film, for example, in which he "almost simultaneously expresses fear, anxiety, defiance, and incredulity. It is an acting tour de force one would expect of a veteran actor, not from a young song-and-dance man recently come to acting." McCabe shows how Cagney's hands "function in the way a dancer uses his body." In discussing the otherwise forgettable Great Guy (1936), McCabe notes that "in moments of stress his right hand becomes a lithe snake's head that writhes and lunges in anger, changing with the sudden lift of an admonitory finger to make its own emphatic, intimidating statement."

Cagney deeply resented Jack Warner and the studio system that made him a star but confined him to hoodlum roles. In 1942 Cagney and his manager-brother Bill launched Cagney Productions, an independent film company affiliated with United Artists. Bill Cagney explained that his brother had been "typed as exactly the kind of guy our mother had tried to push us farthest away from. So for ten years Jimmy makes five pictures a year and all along the same Warner Brothers formula - Jimmy is a heel for eight reels, then clean him up in the ninth." Cagney's audience, however, was not interested in seeing him portray a mild-mannered, small-town newspaper editor (in Cagney Productions' Johnny Come Lately, 1943). As the critic Lincoln Kirstein astutely observed in 1932, Cagney "creates his own type." He "is the first definitely metropolitan figure to become national, as opposed to the suburban national figure of a few years ago, or of the farmer before that."

Kirstein also noted that "Cagney is mick-Irish," a handy attribute when it came time for Cagney to portray one of his idols, George M. Cohan, in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but a mixed blessing for an artist who quickly grew tired of his street persona. McCabe, who also ghostwrote the actor's 1976 autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, provides ample hints of Cagney's ambivalent view toward his heritage and early life, but he does not fully explore his paradoxical, even contrary nature. The city boy greatly preferred life on his various farms in upstate New York and Martha's Vineyard. His best friends were the actors Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh, but he bristled when the Boys Club they founded with Spencer Tracy in the late 1930s (and which did include such non-Hibernians as Ralph Bellamy) was tagged by columnists as the "Irish Mafia." After being robbed of two dollars by a priest who failed to appear for "a simple prayer service" following his father's death, Cagney boycotted the church for life, but he later told gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that "for him Christ's life and words were ever meaningful as guides for his life and that a man neglected spirituality at serious risk to his completeness as a human."

Cagney and his wife lived on a socialist commune in New Jersey in the mid-1920s; in the early thirties, in response to a friend's questionnaire, he listed Joseph Stalin as his favorite living person (and England as his favorite "other country"). McCabe reveals that Bill Cagney convinced his brother to accept the lead role in Yankee Doodle Dandy as "an antidote to his so-called overliberal reputation," but McCabe provides only anecdotal accounts of the actor's political views, which shifted abruptly rightward in the post-Roosevelt era. Finally, the man devoted to memories of his poor but happy family adopted, with Willie, two children in 1940 and promptly relegated them to a separate home on the Cagneys' Cold Water Canyon property, where they were raised by a house, keeper. McCabe blames Willie Cagney for this bizarre decision and the great unhappiness that ensued for the children, but it is another jarring note in a biography determined to maintain its celebratory tone.

Pat O'Brien called his friend James Cagney a "faraway fella," and so he remains. It may be that Cagney's struggle to reconcile his early life with his stardom holds the key to his appeal, but until that issue is probed more deeply, Cagney will serve as a rich entertainment.

James T. Fisher is the author, most recently, of Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 (University of Massachusetts Press).