Motherhood Quote by James Cagney

A future tough-guy icon admitting he “had fun” as a chorus girl is classic James Cagney: the hard shell with a vaudeville pulse underneath. The line lands because it quietly punctures the myth of the born-macho leading man. Before the grapefruit-and-gunfire screen persona, Cagney came up in the scrappy ecosystem of early 20th-century musical theater, where work was work and performance was performance. “Every Sailor” sounds like disposable entertainment, but that’s part of the point: careers in show business often begin in the unglamorous churn of touring shows and chorus lines, not in prestige roles.

The small hinge in the sentence is “Mother didn’t really approve.” That isn’t just family color; it’s an index of respectability politics. Chorus work carried a whiff of moral suspicion in the period, especially for women, and Cagney’s phrasing knowingly borrows that stigma for himself. He’s reporting, with a wink, how gendered the rules were: the same stage could be “fun” for him and “not approved” in a way that hints at class anxiety, Catholic guilt, or plain old parental fear of bohemian life.

“Through” (almost certainly “though”) gives it the feel of spoken recollection, not polished autobiography. That informality is the subtext: he’s not confessing, he’s normalizing. Cagney frames the experience as joyful training and a little rebellion, a reminder that the American star machine was built on performers who learned timing, rhythm, and crowd psychology long before Hollywood told them who they were allowed to be.