Gary Cooper (7 May 1901 – 13 May 1961) was an American actor who won two Academy Awards for Best Actor and was nominated for three more. Born "Frank James Cooper" in Helena, Montana, he was the son of English immigrants, including the Montana Supreme Court justice Charles Henry Cooper. He was raised in England before returning to the United States in 1912, and, in 1924, the family moved from Bozeman, Montana to Los Angeles, California.
Cooper was a conservative Republican like his father, and he voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932, Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944. He criticized the New Deal for its "foreign notions", and he later co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to oppose both communism and fascism. However, he later defended the CPUSA film director Carl Foreman as "the finest kind of American". In 1959, after making a pilgrimage to Rome with his separated wife six years earlier and reconciling with her through her church, he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. He died of colon cancer in 1961.