Dead of the Day:

Before we start, I’d like to warn any left-handed cricket pitchers out there to be on your alert. March 30th is a bad day for your position. Of the six cricketeers who died today, two of them—George Paine (1978), and Tony Locke (1995) were lefty “spinners.” As a fellow southpaw, I sympathize; we are likelier to die any day of the year. But since I care little about cricket—it’s baseball on thorazine, if you ask me—I have little else to say than be careful out there.

Two famed record producers also passed away on March 30th: Paul A. Rothchild, who produced classic albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Doors, Love, Janis Joplin, and Bonnie Raitt, died in 1995, and Phil Ramone, whose beautifully recorded, almost hermetically sealed productions can be heard on Simon and Garfunkel’s, Paul Simon’s and Billy Joel’s biggest albums, passed in 2013.

But the man who gets pride of place today is James Cagney, the song-and-dance man tough guy whose charm and energy allowed him to play a broad range of characters from the gangsters Tom Powers (in “Public Enemy”) and Cody Jarrett (“White Heat”) and George M. Cohan )”Yankee Doodle Dandy”). His side-of-the -mouth New York accents and innate sense of timing allowed him to shine in lighter roles, such as Bottom in the 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and as the harried Coca Cola executive dealing with the daughter of his boss in Cold War-era West Berlin in Billy Wilder’s 1961 farce, “One, Two Three.”

He retired after that film, and did not return to the screen until Milos Forman’s 1981 adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” where his sly turn as New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo was the movie’s highlights.

Offscreen, Cagney could be a pugnacious as his characters; he was not afraid to walk out if he felt he was not getting the respect he deserved and limited his appearances to four movies a year. He was also politically active—a driving force in the creation of the Screen Actor’s Guild, supported the Spanish Republican Army, and was one of the earliest actors to come out against the Nazis. As he told a fellow actor in 1961, the secret to success is “you walk in, plant yourself squarely on both feet, look the other fella in the eye, and tell the truth.”

Cagney died today in 1986 of a heart attack at his home in upstate New York.

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.