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Archibald Alec Leach (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986), better known by his
screen name, Cary Grant, was an iconic English film actor. With his distinctive
Mid-Atlantic accent, he was noted as perhaps the foremost exemplar of the debonair
leading man, handsome, virile, charismatic and charming. He was named the second
Greatest Male Star of All Time of American cinema, after Humphrey Bogart, by the
American Film Institute.
 Early life
and career
Archibald Alec Leach was born in Horfield, Bristol,
England in 1904. He attended Bishop Road Primary School. An only child, he had
a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother Elsie was placed by his father in
a mental institution when Archie was ten. She had apparently never overcome
her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy. His father, who
had a son with another woman, told him that she had gone away on a "long
holiday". It was only when he was in his thirties that he discovered she was
still alive, and institutionalized.
After being expelled from Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol in 1918, he joined
the "Bob Pender stage troupe" and travelled with the group as a stilt walker to the
United States in 1920, on the RMS Olympic for a two-year tour. When the troupe
returned to England, he decided to stay in the U.S. and continue his stage
career.
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). Over time, he created a unique accent and persona that mixed working and
upper class accents, while supporting himself as a hawker and a male escort for
socialites.
Hollywood
stardom
After some success in light Broadway comedies, he came to Hollywood in 1931, where
he acquired the name Cary Grant.
His stardom owes a great deal to Mae West. Grant became a star when Mae West chose
him for her leading man in two of her most successful films, She Done Him Wrong and
I'm No Angel (both 1933). (Encyclopedia Britannia, Cary Grant biography)
Her next release was I'm No Angel, which paired her with Grant again. "I'm No
Angel" was nominated for an Academy Award for "Best Picture." It was a tremendous
financial success and, along with She Done Him Wrong, saved Paramount from
bankruptcy.
Grant starred in some of the classic screwball comedies, including Bringing Up Baby
with Katharine Hepburn, His Girl Friday with Rosalind Russell and Arsenic and Old
Lace with Priscilla Lane. His role in The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne was the
pivotal film in the establishment of Grant's screen persona. These performances
solidified his appeal, and The Philadelphia Story, with Hepburn and James Stewart,
showcased his best-known screen persona: 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.
Grant was one of Hollywood's top box-office attractions for several decades. He was
a versatile actor, who did demanding physical comedy in movies like Gunga Din with
the skills he had learned on the stage. Howard Hawks said that Grant was "so far
the best that there isn't anybody to be compared to him".
Grant was a favorite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, notorious for disliking actors, who
said that Grant was "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". Grant appeared
in such Hitchcock classics as Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by
Northwest.
In the mid-1950s, Grant formed his own production company, Grantley Productions,
and produced a number of movies distributed by Universal, such as Operation
Petticoat, Indiscreet, That Touch of Mink (co-starring Doris Day), and Father
Goose.
Grant was nominated for two Academy Awards in the 1940s. He was denied the Oscar
throughout his active career as he was considered a maverick by virtue of the fact
that he was the first actor to "go independent," effectively bucking the old studio
system, which almost completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. In
this way, Grant was able to control every aspect of his career. Grant received a
special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970. In 1981, he was accorded
the Kennedy Center Honors.
In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the United States in a
one man show. It was called "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would
show clips from his films and answer audience questions. It was just before one of
these performances in Davenport, Iowa, on November 29, 1986, that Grant suffered a
stroke and died.
Personal life in
Hollywood
Grant's personal life was complicated, involving five
marriages. Rumors persisted regarding his sexual orientation.
Marriages
Grant's first wife, Virginia Cherrill, divorced him on March 26, 1935 following
charges that Grant had hit her. They married on February 10, 1934.
Grant became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1942 in order to defuse the scandal
resulting from his failure to return to Britain to serve in the military. Grant
married ultra-wealthy socialite Barbara Hutton and became a surrogate father and
lifelong influence on her son, Lance Reventlow, who later died in a plane crash.
The couple were derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary," although in an extensive
prenuptial agreement Grant refused any financial settlement in the event of a
divorce. After divorcing in 1945, they remained lifelong friends.
Grant married third wife, actress Betsy Drake, on December 25, 1949. Grant appeared
with her in two films. This would prove to be his longest marriage, ending on
August 14, 1962. Drake introduced Grant to LSD, and in the early '60s he related
how treatment with the hallucinogenic drug — legal at the time — at a prestigious
California clinic had finally brought him inner peace after yoga, hypnotism, and
mysticism had proved ineffective.
His fourth marriage to actress Dyan Cannon, who was thirty-three years his junior,
took place on July 22, 1965 in Las Vegas. The marriage was followed by the
premature birth of his only child, Jennifer Grant, on February 26, 1966 when Grant
was sixty-two. He frequently called her his "best production", and regretted that
he hadn't had children sooner. The marriage was troubled from the beginning and
Cannon left him in December 1966, claiming that Grant flew into frequent rages and
spanked her when she "disobeyed" him. The divorce, finalized in 1968, was bitter
and public, and custody fights over their daughter went on for around ten
years.
On April 11, 1981 Grant married his long-time companion, British hotel PR agent
Barbara Harris, who was forty-seven years his junior. Harris was by his side when
he died.
Politics
Grant
was a Republican. He introduced First Lady Betty Ford to the audience at the
Republican National Convention in 1976. He was opposed to McCarthyism and
defended Charles Chaplin in 1953.
Legacy
In 2001 a statue of Grant was erected in Millennium Square, a regenerated area next
to the harbor in his city of birth — Bristol, England.
In November 2004 Grant was named "The Greatest Movie Star of All Time" by Premiere
Magazine.
Ian Fleming stated that he partially had Cary Grant in mind when he created his
suave super-spy, James Bond. Sean Connery was selected for the first James Bond
movie because of his likeness to Grant. Likewise, the later Bond, Roger Moore, was
also selected for sharing Grant's wry sense of humor.
Source :
Some of the information on this page came from a
Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation License.
©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Cary
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