March 14, 2005

Movie trivia

After I posted that last entry, Mac mailed me a link to the IMDB’s bio of James Cagney. And, here’s something I didn’t know, Cagney spoke fluent Yiddish.
According to his authorized biography, Cagney, although of Irish and Norwegian extraction, could speak Yiddish since he had grown up in a heavily Jewish area in New York. He used to converse in Yiddish with Jewish performers like Sylvia Sidney.