An Unlikely Friendship

Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper were best friends for 20 years despite being on opposite sides of the political spectrum and having quite different temperaments.

 

Cooper had starred in the movie version of Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” (1932) before the men met in Idaho in 1940. Hemingway later insisted Cooper be cast in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943). 

After a critical and commercial decline, each rebounded in 1952, Cooper with “High Noon” (for which he won his second Oscar) and Hemingway with “The Old Man and the Sea” (and, two years later, his Nobel Prize). 

They died weeks apart in 1961.