Eisenhower and Nixon Certificate of Appreciation to James Cagney 1956

Beautifully engraved certificate from the Eisenhower-Nixon southern California Committee dated November 7, 1956. This historic document has an ornate border around it with vignettes of Dwight D. eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. This item has the printed signatures of the reelction committes officers and is over 49 years old. The certificate was issued to the actor James Cagney and came from his estate. The item has been folded.






Certificate Vignette



Jimmy Cagney was part of the Legends of Hollywood USPS stamp series.James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899–March 30, 1986) was an American film actor.

Born in Yonkers, New York, Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918.

He worked in vaudeville and on Broadway, marrying the dancer Frances Willard (aka: "Billie") Vernon on September 28, 1922. When Warner Brothers bought the film rights to the play Penny Arcade they took Cagney and his co-star Joan Blondell from the stage to the screen in Sinner's Holiday (1930).

Cagney went on to star in numerous films, making his name as a 'tough guy' in a series of crime films such as The Public Enemy (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931) and Hard to Handle (1933). He went on to better things including Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), an Academy Award-winning role in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), White Heat (1949), ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"), and Mister Roberts (1955).

He was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild and president of the Guild from 1942-44.

Cagney's final appearance on film was in Ragtime in 1981, capping a career that covered over seventy films, although his last film prior to Ragtime had been 20 years earlier in 1961 with Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. During this hiatus Cagney rebuffed all film offers, including a substantial one in My Fair Lady, to devote time to learning how to paint (at which he became very accomplished), and tending to his beloved farm in Stanfordville, New York.

In 1974 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Film Institute and in 1984 his friend Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Cagney's health deteriorated substantially after 1979, and the role in Ragtime, as well as a later television appearance in 1984, was designed to aid in his convalescence.

James Cagney died aged 86 of a heart attack while ill with diabetes in Stanfordville, New York and is interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. As a tribute to his myriad talents and interests, his pallbearers included boxer Floyd Patterson, ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, actor Ralph Bellamy, and film director Milos Forman.