Cary Grant

Archibald Alexander Leach (January 18 1904 – November 29 1986), better known by his screen name, Cary Grant, was a British-born film actor. With his distinctive Mid-Atlantic accent, he was noted as perhaps the foremost exemplar of the debonair leading man, handsome, witty and charming. He was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time of American cinema by the American Film Institute.

Biography

Early life and career

Archibald Alexander Leach was born in Horfield, Bristol, England in 1904 (Though in the 2006 film The Holiday several characters recall Cary Grant being from Surrey, he was not). An only child, he had a confused and unhappy childhood. 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 vacation", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.

After being expelled from Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol in 1918 (for investigating the girls' bathroom), he joined the Bob Pender stage troupe and travelled with the group to the United States in 1920 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.^{[citation needed]}

Hollywood stardom

After some success in light Broadway comedies, he came to Hollywood in 1931, where he acquired the 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.

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".^[1]

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".^[2] 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.

While 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 pretty much completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. In this way, Grant was able to control every aspect of his career. Grant finally received a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970. In 1981, he received the Kennedy Center Honors.

In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the United States with "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 and rumors regarding his sexual orientation.

Marriages

Grant's first wife was actress Virginia Cherrill. They married on February 10, 1934, and divorced on March 26, 1935 following charges that Grant had hit her.

After becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1942, Grant married ultra-wealthy socialite Barbara Hutton, becoming 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's third wife was actress Betsy Drake (born September 11, 1923), with whom he appeared in two films. This was his longest marriage (December 25, 1949 - August 14, 1962). Drake introduced Grant to LSD, and in the early '60s he related how treatment with the hallucinogenic drug at a prestigious California clinic — legal at the time — had finally brought him inner peace after yoga, hypnotism, and mysticism had proved ineffective.

His fourth marriage to actress Dyan Cannon (thirty-three years his junior) took place on July 22 1965 in Las Vegas, and 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 about 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; she was by his side when he died.

Politics

Politically, Grant was a Republican. He introduced First Lady Betty Ford to the audience at the Republican National Convention in 1976.

Rumours of bisexuality

Throughout his time in Hollywood, Grant was rumoured to be homosexual or bisexual. In 1932 he met fellow actor Randolph Scott on the set of Hot Saturday, and the two shared a rented beach house (known as "Bachelor Hall") on and off for twelve years. Rumors ran rampant at the time that Grant and Scott were lovers. Authors Marc Elliot, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley consider Grant to have been bisexual, with Higham and Moseley claiming that Grant and Scott were seen kissing in a public carpark outside a social function both attended in the 1960s. In his book, Hollywood Gays, Boze Hadleigh cites an interview with homosexual director George Cukor, who said about the alleged homosexual relationship between Scott and Grant: "Oh, Cary won't talk about it. At most, he'll say they did some wonderful pictures together. But Randolph will admit it – to a friend."

Homosexual screenwriter Arthur Laurents indicated that Grant was bisexual. In his memoir, he says, Grant "told me he threw pebbles at my window one night but was luckless-I wasn't home. ... his eyes and his smile implied that ... he would have liked doing what we would have done had I been home.^[3] William J. Mann's book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 recounts how photographer Jerome Zerbe spent "three gay months" (his words) in the movie colony taking many photographs of Grant and Scott, "attesting to their involvement in the gay scene." Zerbe says that he often stayed with the two actors, "finding them both warm, charming, and happy." In addition, Darwin Porter's book, Brando Unzipped (2006) claims that Grant had a homosexual affair with Marlon Brando.

Many writers seem to have no doubt about the actor's bisexuality; Grant, however, did not identify himself as such. He had many gay friends, including Cukor, William Haines, and Australian artist and costume designer Orry-Kelly, but when comedian Chevy Chase joked about Grant being gay in a television interview with Tom Snyder in 1980 ("Oh, what a gal!") Grant sued him for slander; they settled out of court. Grant complained to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich about the Chevy Chase incident, emphatically insisting that he was not gay, and that while he had nothing against homosexuals, he was simply not one himself (this exchange is cited at length in the chapter on Grant in Bogdanovich's 2005 book Who the Hell's in It?).

In a 2004 interview for the Turner Classic Movies production, Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Grant's third wife, Betsy Drake, mocks the rumors, saying, "I didn't have time to think about his homosexuality. We were too busy fucking".

In the 2004 comedy Touch of Pink, the protagonist, a closeted gay man, is visited and mentored by the ghost of Cary Grant (played by Kyle MacLachlan).

Legacy

In November 2004 Grant was named "The Greatest Movie Star of All Time" by Premiere Magazine. [1]

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.

Quotations

• "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant; even I want to be Cary Grant."

• "I probably chose my profession because I was seeking approval, adulation, admiration and affection."

• "I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each."

• Visiting his agent Grant intercepted a telegram from a journalist writing a profile asking "How Old Cary Grant?" Grant sent a reply saying "Old Cary Grant fine, how you?". (Actually not true. But when asked about the telegram by an interviewer, Cary did say that he wished he had done that.)

• The dichotomy between Leach and Grant was referenced in his films from time to time:
  • In Arsenic and Old Lace Grant is in a graveyard, and one of the stones reads "Archie Leach".
  • In His Girl Friday, he responds to a pointed comment by saying, "The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat."
  • His character in Gunga Din was named "Archie".

• In one of his early films, She Done Him Wrong, Grant engages in this memorable dialogue with the film's sexy star, Mae West:

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Mae: I always did like a man in a uniform. That one fits you grand. Why don't you come up sometime 'n see me? I'm home every evening.

Cary: Yeah, but I'm busy every evening.

Mae: Busy? So, what are you tryin' to do, insult me?

Cary: Why no, no, not at all. I'm just busy, that's all...

Mae: You ain't kiddin' me any. You know, I met your kind before. Why don't you come up sometime, huh?

Cary: Well, I...

Mae: Don't be afraid. I won't tell...Come up. I'll tell your fortune ... Aw, you can be had.

• Although many Cary Grant impressions include the quotation, "Judy, Judy, Judy", Grant never actually said that phrase in any of his movies. In Only Angels Have Wings, his character says "Oh, Judy," and "Come on, Judy," but that's as close as it gets.

Trivia

• In the film A Fish Called Wanda, the character played by John Cleese is named Archibald Leach, Cary Grant's real name [2]. Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, just a few kilometres from Grant's birthplace, Bristol.
• Grant replaced James Stewart as the hapless ad man Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest. Years earlier, Stewart replaced Grant as Rupert Cadell in Rope, in which another character makes reference to Grant's first film with Ingrid Bergman, Notorious.
• Some of his younger fans told him that he looked just like the comic book superhero Captain Marvel. (However, cartoonist C. C. Beck in fact based the superhero's appearance on fellow actor Fred MacMurray.)
• Tony Curtis used Grant's voice style in Some Like it Hot. At one point in the film, Jack Lemmon says that "nobody talks like that." The film was set in the 1920s United States, so he was probably right. Reportedly, after seeing the film, Cary Grant said of Curtis's impression, "I don't talk like that."

Filmography

References

Further reading

• Marc Eliot, Cary Grant: A Biography Aurum Press, 2005 ISBN 1-84513-073-1
• Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart Thompson Learning, 1997, ISBN 0-15-115787-1
• Warren Johansson & William A. Percy, Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Harrington Park Press, 1994, pp.146-7.
• Graham McCann, Cary Grant: A Class Apart Fourth Estate, 1997, ISBN 1-85702-574-1
• Gary Morcambe and Martin Sterling, Cary Grant: In Name Alone Robson Books, 2001, ISBN 1-86105-466-1
• Nancy Nelson, Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best, Citadel Press, 2002.
• Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies [revised edition] Harrow & Row, 1987, ISBN 0-06-096132-5
• Geoffrey Wansell, Cary Grant: Dark Angel Arcade, 1997, ISBN 1-55970-369-5

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