His father, an English immigrant to Montana who became a wealthy lawyer and rancher, was a judge on the Montana Supreme Court.
His lovers included Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Carole Lombard, Lupe Velez, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Patricia Neal. Sir Cecil Beaton also claimed to have had an affair with him.
His mother Alice Cooper died in a Palm Desert convalescent home in October 1967, at the age of 94. His brother Arthur Cooper died in May 1982, at the age of 87.
His mother's favorite movie of his is The Pride of the Yankees (1942).
His Oscar-winning roles as Will Kane from High Noon (1952) and Sgt. Alvin York from Sergeant York (1941) were ranked #5 and #35 in the American Film Institute's Heroes list in their 100 years of The Greatest Screen Heroes and Villains.
His reputation as an unthinking conservative seems largely undeserved. Though he appeared as a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, he carefully avoided naming any people he suspected of having Communist sympathies within the Hollywood community. He later starred in High Noon (1952), a western that was an allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, and strongly defended blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman from attacks by the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Foreman later credited Cooper as the only major star in Hollywood who tried to help him. His mistress Patricia Neal, who did consider herself a liberal, said Gary was "conservative" but "you couldn't call him right-wing". Cooper showed a sense of humor by asking John Wayne to collect his Oscar for him in 1953, after Wayne had criticized High Noon (1952) as "anti-American".
His shot from High Noon (1952) was used as a Solidarity candidates trademark of the first independent elections in Poland in June 1989 ("There's a new sheriff in town")
Hobbies: Fishing, hunting, riding, swimming, and taxidermy.
In High Noon, Gary Cooper's character (Marshal Will Kane) is betrayed by all the "good" men in town who will not take up arms for a just cause. Carl Foreman (screenplay and uncredited producer) stated that High Noon was intended as an allegory of the contemporary failure of intellectuals to combat the rise of McCarthyism, as well as how people in Hollywood had remained silent while their peers were blacklisted. The film has also been embraced by those who, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, admire its emphasis on duty and courage.
In 1925 he befriended another young, struggling, would-be actor named Walter Brennan. At one point, they were even appearing as a team at casting offices, and although Cooper emerged in major and leading roles first, they would work together in the good years, too. Most memorably they starred in The Westerner (1940) together, where the general critical consensus was that Brennan's underplayed performance as Judge Roy Bean had stolen the film from Cooper.
In 1932 he was named as a supporter and benefactor of a right-wing organization known as the Hollywood Light Horse, which described itself as "a military organization formed to promote Americanism and combat Communism and radicalism subversive to Constitutional government", and which numbered English actor Victor McLaglen as one of its members. The assertion that Cooper was an active supporter was quickly withdrawn following protests by his representatives.
In 1938 Cooper took his wife on a junket to England and the Continent, and was the last American movie star to visit Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of World War II. Until that point he had been basically apolitical and isolationist, opposed to President Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations. When the fateful Munich Conference immediately followed Cooper's return to America, he became increasingly active in the film community's pastime of playing national partisan politics. His allegiance to the right wing would be fairly consistent, though never a sure thing. He said he believed the United States should become more involved diplomatically in world affairs, but felt it was no business of Hollywood's. He said pointedly that MGM's cautiously anti-Nazi Three Comrades (1938) with it's F. Scott Fitzgerald screenplay should not have been made, and that henceforth he would give more thoughtful attention to some of the film projects he was offered.
In 1940, Cooper actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie as the Republican challenger to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's quest for a third term of office. Cooper believed Roosevelt was already too powerful, and would become more so. He told Cecelia Ager though that he advocated most of the New Deal reforms and believed the GOP made a mistake by not emphasizing their intention of retaining most of them. He said, "There's no going back to the ways of the Old Guard." Willkie, a well known womanizer, became firm friends with the actor.
In 1943 Cooper was one of the founding members of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, called merely "the Alliance" in the film community. Its other early leaders included Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Norman Taurog, Clarence Brown, and Walt Disney. Clark Gable, thought of as one whose apolitical inclination was even more pronounced than Cooper's, was also a member. The Alliance's cheerleader was Lela E. Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers.
In 1944 he formed his own production company, International Pictures, with Samuel Goldwyn. His partners were Leo Spitz, William Goetz (who'd recently been ousted from 20th Century Fox) and Nunnally Johnson. They only produced nine movies, two of which starred Cooper, Casanova Brown (1944)_ and Along Came Jones (1945). Then in 1946 they sold International Pictures to Universal Pictures, which changed its name to Universal-International.
In 1951 he organized his own production company once more, calling it Baroda and buying the film rights to Alfred Hayes's best-selling novel "The Girl on the Via Flaminia". He paid $40,000 for the rights, and $10,000 to Hayes for a screenplay. He wanted to star in it with the young Montgomery Clift, the most popular young actor in Hollywood and also one of the best. Cooper could not arrange financing but broke even on his investment by selling the property to Leland Hayward and Anatole Litvak with the stipulation that Clift would have to star in it. The film was never made. Litvak, however, eventually made a film of The Chase (1966) much later, with Marlon Brando in the sheriff role that was being talked about in 1950 as Cooper's likely stage debut. John Hodiak took the role in Horton Foote's play when Cooper was unable to clear time with Warner Brothers - if indeed he tried.
In 1951, after 25 years in show business, his professional reputation declined, and he was dropped from the Motion Picture Herald's list of the top 10 Box Office performers. In the following year he made a big comeback at the age of fifty-one with High Noon (1952).
In 1958 Cooper had a private audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican, and in the following year became a convert to Roman Catholicism.
In 1960, for the first time since his arrival in Hollywood, there were no new Gary Cooper pictures. In the spring of that year he underwent several operations for prostate cancer, but in the autumn managed to film one final movie in England, The Naked Edge (1961).
In 1968 a "Variety" magazine poll of popular television personalities still included Cooper and his one-time rival Clark Gable, even though both actors had died nearly a decade earlier.