Cary Grant, Smooth Hollywood

Archibald Alexander Leach, was born on January 18, 1904 in Bristol, England. He had a confused and unhappy childhood. He was an only child and his mother Elsie (who had apparently never overcome her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy), was placed by his father in a mental institution when Archie was ten. His father (who had a son with another woman) told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.
At an early age he became fascinated by the world of theaters and music halls and in 1918, he joined the "Bob Pender stage troupe" and travelled with the group as a stilt walker to the United States in 1920. When the troupe returned to England, he

decided to stay in the U.S. to pursue a stage career. For five years, Leach eked out a living in jobs as varied as placard walker and society escort. In 1927, he made his first stage appearance in the musical Golden Dawn , followed by appearances in Boom Boom (1929), A Wonderful Night (1929) and Nikki (1931).
Still as Archie Leach, he performed on the stage at The Muny in St. Louis, Missouri, in such shows as Irene (1931); Music in May (1931); Nina Rosa (1931); Rio Rita (1931); Street Singer (1931); The Three Musketeers (1931); and Wonderful Night (1931). After this brief success in 1931 he went to California for a screen test at Paramount and adopted his new name, Cary Grant.

Grant starred in some of the classic screwball comedies, including The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne (the pivotal film in the establishment of Grant's screen persona), Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn, His Girl Friday with Rosalind Russell and Arsenic and Old Lace with Priscilla Lane. These performances solidified his appeal, and The Philadelphia Story, with Hepburn and James Stewart, presented his best-known screen role: the charming if sometimes unreliable man, formerly married to an intelligent and strong-willed woman who first divorced him, then realized that he was - with all his faults - irresistible.

     This Is The Night. Cary's Debut Film.

Grant's feature debut was in This Is the Night (1932). He soon found himself playing colorless characters opposite such top Paramount female stars as Nancy Carroll, Sylvia Sidney, Marlene Dietrich and Mae West (though he said he learned more about acting and comic timing from her than anyone else he ever worked with). It was on a studio loan-out to RKO in 1935, when Grant appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett, that he began to find his form and spark, playing a Cockney entertainer in a traveling troupe, a role for which he could draw on his experiences with the Pender company. When his Paramount contract expired in 1937, Grant bolted, choosing not to sign with another studio. Instead, he selected his own films, scripts and directors.


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For the next three years, Grant appeared in a succession of hits, each of which honed his image to a fine gloss: Bringing up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), Gunga Din (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), My Favorite Wife (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). By 1940, Cary Grant had become an archetype - and a major Hollywood star.

   Hot Saturday (1932)

   With Mae West

   With Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday(1940)

   With Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart
in The Philadelphia Story(1941)

The Philadelphia Story

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY is such an extraordinarily well-done film that one can watch it repeatedly, reveling each time in new and hidden details. It strikes the perfect balance of being spectacularly well-acted, hysterically funny, and delightfully silly while maintaining an elegant veneer. The cast is nearly overwhelming in its quality, with Hepburn and Grant turning in especially fine performances.

Tracy Lords (Katharine Hepburn) is getting married again. This time to a man who worked his way to the top instead of starting there. Dexter (Cary Grant), her first husband invites himself to the wedding and the wedding preparations. Also inviting their selves with a little blackmail to the wedding is a writer, and photographer, from a magazine of dubious reputation. Throw in a philandering father and a friendly uncle. We watch as they go through the motions and emotions of courting and re-evaluating their lives.
This is basically a comedy and yes it has all the actors and writers to make this a piece of cinematic art. However you look at it, it is just great fun to watch.

Grant had become so much of an ideal that to play a normal person on the screen seemed impossible.

   With Ingrid Bergmann in Notorious

Instead, his best roles resulted in his playing off his film image, exposing it and exploiting it particularly in his work with Alfred Hitchcock on Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959), as well as Stanley Donen's Hitchcock-esque Charade.

   Charade(1959)

Seemingly growing handsomer and more charming as he got older, Grant retained his stardom into the 1960s, enriching himself with lucrative percentage-of-profits deals on such box-office hits as Operation Petticoat (1959) and Charade (1964). Upon completing Walk, Don't Run in 1966, Grant decided he was through with filmmaking - and he meant it.

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn: Charade

In CHARADE Audrey Hepburn plays a Parisienne whose husband is murdered and who finds she is being followed by four men seeking the fortune her late spouse had hidden away. Cary Grant is the stranger who comes to her aid, but his real motives aren't entirely clear--could he even be the killer? The 1963 film is directed by Stanley Donen, but it has been called "Hitchcockian" for good reason: the possible duplicities between lovers, the unspoken agendas between a man and woman sharing secrets. Suspense-wise the film holds its own and Donen's glossy production lends itself to the welcome experience of stargazing. One wants Cary Grant to be Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn to be no one but Audrey Hepburn in a Hollywood product such as this, and they certainly don't let us down.

It wasn't until 1935 when his father died, making Grant her next of kin, that he discovered that his mother was still alive, having been confined to an insane asylum for more than twenty years. His father had taken advantage of her depression to have her committed in order to marry his pregnant mistress. Grant traveled to England, had Elsie released from the asylum, arranged for her to stay with relatives when doctors recommended that she remain in England rather than move to California to live with him (in order to ease her transition) then set her up in her own household in Bristol. He continued to support her and visit frequently until her death in 1973 at age 95.

Grant married five times: actress Virginia Cherrell in 1934; heiress Barbara Hutton in 1942;

   With Barbera Hutton(1944)

actress Betsy Drake in 1949; actress Dyan Cannon in 1965; and finally long time companion Barbara Harris in 1981. His first marriage lasted just over a year, his second three years, his fourth two. His marriage to Betsy Drake was more successful, lasting almost thirteen years, and they remained close friends, as did Grant and Hutton. He was married to Barbara Harris at the time of his death.

Not until 1966, when he was 62 years old and married to Dyan Cannon did he achieve his long-standing dream of becoming a father.

   Family man

(His much adored stepson, Lance Reventlow, Barbara Hutton's child from an earlier marriage, had remained a major fixture in Grant's life, even living with Grant and Drake for a time. Lance died at age 36 in a 1972 plane crash.) From the moment she entered the world, Jennifer Grant became the center of her father's universe. Following her birth, he ended his film career, citing the need to spend more time with his daughter. Fatherhood remained the major focus of his life from then on.

Cary Grant never won an Academy Award for acting, despite having been nominated twice, once for Penny Serenade in 1942 and again for None But the Lonely Heart in 1945, but he was honored by the Academy with a lifetime achievement award in 1970. In introducing him that night, Frank Sinatra summed up his friends career stating, "No one has brought more pleasure to more people for so many years. . . nobody has done so many things as well. Cary has so much skill that he makes it all look easy."

Like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, his great contemporaries, he was easy to imitate and impossible to replace.

He also was -- is -- easy to love. Yes, the haircut is perfect, and so is the suit and that cleft in the chin is heaven's thumbmark. But they don't explain why three generations of women have had crushes on him. Apart from being gorgeous, the adjective of many women's choice, he is also a friend. Cary Grant's promise is of more than one glorious night; it's of a lifetime of laughter.

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