(Left to right) Randolph Scott, Nancy Carroll, and Cary Grant with a big chocolate cake during made for the party on the occasion of Scott and Grant birthdays.
Cary Grant, accompanied by Sophia Loren and her husband Carlo Ponti (center) with his David di Donatello Award as the Best Foreign Actor for his role in North by Northwest.
Cary Grant with nurses and members of staff as he leaves Saint John's Hospital in New York after recoving from injuries in a car accident. Photo by Rolls Press.
Cary Grant, original name Archibald Alexander Leach, was a British-born American film actor whose good looks, debonair style, and flair for romantic comedy made him one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring stars.
Background
Ethnicity:
Grant considered himself to have been partly Jewish.
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol suburb of Horfield; the second child of Elias James Leach, a tailor's presser at a clothes factory, and Elsie Maria Leach (née Kingdon), a seamstress. He had an unhappy upbringing; his father was an alcoholic and his mother suffered from clinical depression.
When Grant was nine years old, his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital (a mental institution), and told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday", later declaring that she had died. After Elsie was gone, Grant and his father moved into the home of his grandmother in Bristol. When Grant was 10, his father remarried and started a new family. Grant did not learn that his mother was still alive until he was 31, when his father confessed to the lie, shortly before his own death. Grant made arrangements for his mother to leave the institution in June 1935, shortly after he learned of her whereabouts.
Education
Grant was taught song and dance by his mother when he was four. She would occasionally take him to the cinema where he enjoyed the performances of Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and Broncho Billy Anderson.
Grant entered education when he was four-and-a-half and was sent to the Bishop Road Primary School, Bristol.
After attending Bishop Road Primary School and Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol, he toured the country as a stage performer, and decided to stay in New York City after a performance there. In 1915 Grant won a scholarship to Fairfield Academy.
Career
To escape poverty and a fractious family, Archie Leach ran away from home at age 13 to perform as a juggler with the Bob Pender Troupe of comedians and acrobats. He frequently worked in music halls in London, where he acquired a Cockney accent. Leach made the United States his home during the company’s American tour of 1920, and for the next several years he honed his performing skills in such disparate pursuits as a barker at Coney Island, a stilt walker at Steeplechase Park, and a straight man in vaudeville shows.
His performances throughout the country in numerous stage musicals and comedies during the late 1920s and early ’30s led to a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1932. Studio executives thought "Archie Leach" was an unsuitable name for a leading man and rechristened the actor "Cary Grant," a name he would legally adopt in 1941. Grant first appeared in several short films and low-budget features for Paramount, and he attracted some attention with his role as a wealthy playboy in the Marlene Dietrich vehicle Blonde Venus (1932). The next year 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).
Although he appears a bit reserved in these early films, Grant established a screen persona of debonair charm and an air of humorous intelligence. His screen success was helped in no small measure by the great number of classic films in which he appeared. Upon the expiration of his Paramount contract in 1935, Grant became one of the few top stars to freelance his services, allowing him control over his career and the freedom to choose his scripts carefully.
During the late 1930s and early ’40s, Grant established himself in the genres of screwball comedy and action-adventure. Katharine Hepburn and Irene Dunne were his frequent and highly effective costars. With Hepburn he appeared in the drag comedy Sylvia Scarlett (1935), the classic screwball comedies Holiday (1938) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), and the upper-class satire The Philadelphia Story (1940), and with Dunne he made the madcap farces The Awful Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940) as well as the comic tearjerker Penny Serenade (1941). Grant also proved himself capable of rugged action roles, with well-regarded performances in the popular Only Angels Have Wings and Gunga Din (both 1939). Other Grant classics from this period include his turns as a whimsical poltergeist in Topper (1937) and as the charmingly conniving newspaper editor Walter Burns in His Girl Friday (1940), which is regarded as one of the greatest comedies in movie history. Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Leo McCarey, George Stevens, Garson Kanin, and Frank Capra were some of the renowned directors for whom Grant worked during this time.
Grant’s association with Alfred Hitchcock resulted in some of the best work from both men. The director elicited some of the actor’s best performances by casting him somewhat against type: the characters Grant portrays in the Hitchcock films have an underlying dark side that was compellingly juxtaposed with his characteristic suave demeanour. In their first collaboration, Suspicion (1941), Grant played an unsympathetic character who may or may not be a murderer. He gave a fascinating and appropriately disturbing performance as a callous American agent who uses the woman he loves (Ingrid Bergman) to his own advantage in Notorious (1946), one of Hitchcock’s most-renowned films. In the next decade, Grant appeared in Hitchcock’s lighthearted and stylish caper To Catch a Thief (1955), a film noted for its ad-libbed scenes, rife with double-entendres, between Grant and costar Grace Kelly. North by Northwest (1959) was a career milestone for both Grant and Hitchcock and is regarded as a masterful blend of suspense and humour.
Grant received Academy Award nominations twice - for Penny Serenade and None but the Lonely Heart (1944) - and received an honorary Oscar in 1970, but he and Edward G. Robinson share the dubious distinction of being Hollywood’s most highly regarded actors never to have won Oscars for acting. His performances in such memorable films as Mr. Lucky (1943), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Monkey Business (1952), and An Affair to Remember (1957) have nonetheless stood the test of time far better than the work of many of his award-winning contemporaries.
Grant’s screen career extended into the 1960s, when he appeared in such films as the romantic farce That Touch of Mink (1962) with Doris Day and the stylish caper Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn. Walk Don’t Run (1966) inadvertently became his final film, as he was enmeshed in divorce (from fourth wife Dyan Cannon) and child-custody proceedings that dragged on until 1969 and consumed his attention; it is said that he lost much of his interest in filmmaking during that period.
After walking away from acting, Grant still appeared in public. He became a director of the Fabergé company and served as the fragrance firm's brand ambassador, traveling around to promote its products.
Grant agreed to a special public appearance in Davenport, Iowa, on November 29, 1986, but he never made it to the theater that night. He suffered a fatal stroke in his hotel room.
Cary Grant is widely regarded as one of the most handsome men in film history. Adding to his appeal was his unique speaking voice: his not wholly successful efforts to rid himself of his natural Cockney accent resulted in a clipped, much-imitated speaking pattern. He became known for his transatlantic accent, debonair demeanor, and light-hearted approach to acting and a sense of comic timing.
Grant is remembered by critics for his unusually broad appeal, as a handsome, suave actor who did not take himself too seriously, possessing the ability to play with his own dignity in comedies without sacrificing it entirely.
He was immaculate in his personal grooming, and Edith Head, the renowned Hollywood costume designer, appreciated his "meticulous" attention to detail and considered him to have had the greatest fashion sense of any actor she had worked with. McCann attests his "almost obsessive maintenance" with tanning, which deepened the older he got, to Douglas Fairbanks, who also had a major influence on his refined sense of dress.
McCann notes that because Grant came from a working-class background and was not well educated, he made a particular effort over the course of his career to mix with high society and absorb their knowledge, manners and etiquette to compensate and cover it up. His image was meticulously crafted from the early days in Hollywood, where he would frequently sunbathe and avoid being photographed smoking, despite smoking two packs a day at the time. Grant quit smoking in the early 1950s through hypnotherapy. He remained health conscious, staying very trim and athletic even into his late career, though Grant admitted he "never crook a finger to keep fit".
Connections
Grant was married five times. He wed Virginia Cherrill on February 9, 1934. She divorced him on March 26, 1935, following charges that Grant had hit her. After the demise of the marriage, he dated actress Phyllis Brooks from 1937. They had considered marriage, and vacationed together in Europe in mid-1939, before the relationship ended later that year.
In 1942 he married Barbara Hutton, one of the wealthiest women in the world following a $50 million inheritance from her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth. After divorcing in 1945, they remained the "fondest of friends". After dating Betty Hensel for a period, on December 25, 1949, Grant married Betsy Drake, the co-star of two of his films. This would prove to be his longest marriage, ending on August 14, 1962.
Grant married Dyan Cannon on July 22, 1965. Their daughter, Grant's only child, Jennifer, was born on February 26, 1966. Grant and Cannon divorced in March 1968.
Grant had a brief affair with self-proclaimed actress Cynthia Bouron in the late 1960s. Between 1973 and 1977 he dated British photojournalist Maureen Donaldson, followed by the much younger Victoria Morgan.
On April 11, 1981, Grant married Barbara Harris, a British hotel public relations agent who was 47 years his junior. The two had met at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London five years earlier where Harris was working at the time and Grant attending a Fabergé conference. The two became friends, but it was not until 1979 that she moved to live with him in California.