 Archibald Alexander Leach (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986), better known
by his screen name, Cary Grant, was an English film actor. He was perhaps the
foremost exemplar of the debonair leading man, not only handsome, but also witty
and charming. He was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time by the
American Film Institute.
Early Life and Career
Archie Leach was born in Horfield, Bristol, England. An only child (before he
was born his parents had had another son who died in infancy), Leach had a
confused and unhappy childhood. His mother, Elsie, was placed in a mental
institution when he was nine. His father (who later had a relationship with
another woman, with whom he had a son) never told him the truth, and he only
learned in 1935 that she was still alive, in an institution.
This left Leach with an insecurity in his relations with women and a
secretiveness about his inner life. These insecurities, by his own admission,
led him to crave applause and attention and to create a new persona that would
attract it. After being expelled from Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol in
1918 (for investigating the girls' bathroom), he joined the Bob Pender stage
troupe. Grant traveled with the troupe to the United States in 1920 for a
two-year tour; when the troupe returned to England, Grant decided to stay in the
US.
Over time, he created a unique accent and persona that mixed working and upper
class accents, while supporting himself as, among other things, a hawker.
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 is. 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.
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. The cost was no golden statuette during his active career. Grant finally
received the long overdue honors he so deserved in 1970 with a special Academy
Award for Lifetime Achievement. 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 (November
29, 1986), and died in the hospital a few hours later.
|
