Cary Grant
Cary Grant (born Archibald Alec Leach; January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986) was an English-American actor, known as one ofclassic Hollywood's definitiveleading men. He began a career in Hollywood in the early 1930s, and became known for histransatlantic accent, debonair demeanor, light-hearted approach to acting, and sense of comic timing. He became anAmerican citizenin 1942.
Born in Horfield, Bristol, Grant became attracted to theatre at a young age, and began performing with a troupe known as "The Penders" from the age of six. 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. He established a name for himself in vaudeville in the 1920s and toured the United States before moving to Hollywood in the early 1930s.
He initially appeared in crime films or dramas such as Blonde Venus (1932) and She Done Him Wrong (1933), but later gained renown for his appearances in romantic comedy and screwball comedy films such as The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Along with the later Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949); these films are frequently cited as among the all-time great comedy films.[1] Having established himself as a major Hollywood star, he was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Penny Serenade (1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944).
In the 1940s and 1950s, Grant forged a working relationship with the director Alfred Hitchcock, appearing in films such as Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief(1955) and North by Northwest (1959). Hitchcock admired Grant and considered him to have been the only actor that he had ever loved working with. Towards the end of his film career, Grant was praised by critics as a romantic leading man, and received five Golden Globe Award for Best Actor nominations, including Indiscreet (1958) with Ingrid Bergman, That Touch of Mink (1962) with Doris Day, and Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn.
He 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. His comic timing and delivery made Grant what Premiere magazine considers to have been "quite simply, the funniest actor cinema has ever produced".
Grant was married five times; three of his marriages were elopements with actresses—Virginia Cherrill(1934–1935),Betsy Drake(1949–1962) andDyan Cannon(1965–1968). He has one daughter with Cannon,Jennifer Grant(born 1966). After his retirement from film acting in 1966, Grant pursued numerous business interests, representing cosmetics firmFabergé, and sitting on the board ofMGMand others. He was presented with anHonorary Oscarby his friend Frank Sinatraat the42nd Academy Awardsin 1970, and in 1981, he was accorded theKennedy Center Honors. In 1999, theAmerican Film Institutenamed Grantthe second greatest male starof Golden Age Hollywood cinema.
Early life and education
Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach[a] on January 18, 1904 at 15 Hughenden Road in the northern Bristol suburb of Horfield.[5][3] He was the second child of Elias James Leach (1873–1935) and Elsie Maria Leach (née Kingdon; 1877–1973).[6] Elias worked as a tailor's presser at a clothes factory while Elsie worked as a seamstress.[7] Grant's elder brother, John William Elias Leach (1899–1900), died of tuberculous meningitis.[8] Grant considered himself to have been partly Jewish.[b] He had an unhappy upbringing; his father was an alcoholic,[13] and his mother suffered from clinical depression.[14]
He had such a traumatic childhood, it was horrible. I work with a lot of kids on the street and I've heard a lot of stories about what happens when a family breaks down — but his was just horrendous.
—Grant's wife Dyan Cannon on his childhood.[15]
Wanting the best for her son, Elsie taught Grant song and dance when he was four, and was keen on him having piano lessons.[16]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.[17]Grant entered education when he was four-and-a-half and was sent to theBishop Road Primary School, Bristol.[18]
Grant's biographer Graham McCann mentions that Maureen Donaldson, a lover of Grant in the 1970s, claimed in her book that his mother "did not know how to give affection and did not know how to receive it either."[19] Another biographer, Geoffrey Wansell, notes that Elsie blamed herself bitterly for the death of Grant's older brother John, and never recovered from it.[c] Grant later acknowledged that his negative experiences with his fiercely independent mother affected his relationships with women later in life.[20] She frowned on alcohol and tobacco,[6] and would reduce pocket money for minor mishaps.[21] Grant later attributed her behaviour towards him as down to her being overprotective, fearing that she would lose him as she did John.[16]
WhenGrant 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",[22] later declaring that she had died.[13]Grant grew up resenting his mother, particularly after she left the family. After Elsie was gone, Grant and his father moved into the home of his grandmother in Bristol.[23]When Grant was 10, his father remarried and started a new family that did not include his son.[15]Grant did not learn that his mother was still alive until he was 31,[24]when his father confessed to the lie, shortly before his own death.[15]Grant made arrangements for his mother to leave the institution in June 1935, shortly after he learned of her whereabouts.[25]He visited her during a break to England in October 1938, after filming forGunga Dinwas completed.[26]
Due to alienation from his parents, he found it difficult to socialize and had a nervous disposition. He enjoyed the theatre, particularly pantomimes at Christmas which he would attend with his father.[21] Grant befriended a troupe of acrobatic dancers, known as "The Penders" or the "Bob Pender Stage Troupe".[27] He subsequently trained as a stilt walker and began touring with them.[28] During a two-week stint at the Wintergarten theatrein Berlin, circa 1914, he was noticed by Jesse Lasky, who was a Broadway producer at the time.[29]
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To console himself, Grant bought a 1927 Packard sport phaeton.[62] He visited his half-brother, Eric, in England, and upon returning to New York later in the year, he played the role of Max Grunewald in a Shubert production of A Wonderful Night.[65] It premiered at the Majestic Theatre on October 31, 1929, two days after the Wall Street Crash, and lasted for 125 shows until February 1930.[66] The play received mixed reviews; one critic criticized his acting, likening it to a "mixture of John Barrymore and cockney", while another announced that he had brought a "breath of elfin Broadway" to the role.[67] Though he began to gain recognition, Grant still found it difficult forming relationships with women, remarking that "In all those years in the theatre, on the road and in New York, surrounded by all sorts of attractive girls, I never seemed able to fully communicate with them."[68]
In 1930, Grant toured for nine months in a production of the musical, The Street Singer.[69] After the production came to end in early 1931, the Shuberts invited him to spend the summer performing on the stage at The Muny in St. Louis, Missouri; he appeared in twelve different productions, putting on 87 shows.[70][g] He received praise from local newspapers for these performances, gaining a reputation as a romantic leading man.[69] Significant influences on his acting in this period were Sir Gerald du Maurier, A. E. Matthews, Jack Buchanan and Ronald Squire.[72]
He later admitted that he was drawn to acting because of a "great need to be liked and admired".[6] Grant was eventually fired by the Shuberts at the end of the summer season when he refused to accept a pay cut because of financial difficulties caused by the Depression.[68] His unemployment was short lived; impresario William B. Friedlander offered him the lead romantic part in his new musical, Nikki, in which Grant starred opposite Fay Wray as a soldier in post-World War I France. The production opened on September 29, 1931 in New York, but was stopped after just 39 performances due to the effects of the Depression.[68]
Film career
See also: Cary Grant on stage, radio and screen
Early roles (1932–1936)
Grant set out to establish himself as what McCann calls the "epitome of masculine glamour", and made Douglas Fairbanks his first role model.[80] McCann notes that Grant's career in Hollywood immediately took off because he exhibited a "genuine charm", which made him stand out among the other good looking actors at the time, making it "remarkably easy to find people who were willing to support his embryonic career".[81] He made his feature film debut with the Frank Tuttle-directed comedy This is the Night(1932), playing an Olympic javelin thrower opposite Thelma Todd and Lili Damita.[82] Grant disliked his role and threatened to leave Hollywood,[83] but to his surprise a critic from Variety praised his performance, and thought that he looked like a "potential femme rave".[84]
Grant's role in Nikki was praised by Ed Sullivan of The New York Daily News, who noted that the "young lad from England" had "a big future in the movies".[73] The review led to another screen test by Paramount Publix, resulting in appearance as a sailor in Singapore Sue (1932), a ten-minute short film by Casey Robinson.[73] Grant delivers his lines "without any conviction" according to McCann.[h] Through Robinson, Grant met with Jesse L. Lasky and B. P. Schulberg, the co-founder and general manager of Paramount Pictures respectively.[75] After a successful screen-test directed by Marion Gering.[i] Schulberg signed a contract with the 27-year-old Grant on December 7, 1931 for five years,[76]at a starting salary of $450 a week.[77] Schulberg demanded that he change his name to "something that sounded more all-American like Gary Cooper", and they eventually agreed on Cary Grant.[78][j]
In 1932, Grant played a wealthy playboy opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Grant's role is described by William Rothman as projecting the "distinctive kind of nonmacho masculinity that was to enable him to incarnate a man capable of being a romantic hero".[85] Grant found that he conflicted with the director during the filming and the two often argued in German.[86] He played a suave playboy type in a number of films: Merrily We Go to Hell opposite Frederic March and Sylvia Sidney, Devil and the Deep alongside Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and Tallulah Bankhead, Hot Saturday opposite Nancy Carroll and Randolph Scott,[87] and Madame Butterfly with Sidney.[88][89] According to biographer Marc Eliot, while these films did not make Grant a star, they did well enough to establish him as one of Hollywood's "new crop of fast-rising actors".[90]
After a string of financially unsuccessful films, which included roles as a president of a company who is sued for knocking down a boy in an accident in Born to Be Bad (1934) for 20th Century Fox,[n] a cosmetic surgeon in Kiss and Make-Up (1934),[103] and a blinded pilot opposite Myrna Loy in Wings in the Dark (1935), successive poor box office takings and press reports of his fledging marriage to Cherrill,[o] led Paramount to form the conclusion that Grant was now expendable.[104][p]In 1933, Grant gained attention for appearing in the pre-Code films She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel opposite Mae West.[k]
West would later claim that she had discovered Cary Grant.[93][l] Pauline Kael noted that Grant did not appear confident in his role as a Salvation Army director in She Done Him Wrong, which made it all the more charming.[95][96] The film was a box office hit, earning more than $2 million in the United States,[97] and has since won much acclaim.[m] For I'm No Angel, Grant's salary was increased from $450 to $750 a week.[100] The film was even more successful than She Done Him Wrong, and saved Paramount from bankruptcy;[100] Vermilye cites it as one of the best comedy films of the 1930s.[101]
Grant's prospects picked up in the latter half of 1935 when he was loaned to RKO Pictures.[107] Producer Pandro Berman agreed to take him on in the face of failure because "I'd seen him do things which were excellent, and [Katharine] Hepburn wanted him too."[108] For his first venture with RKO, playing a raffish cockney swindler in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935), he began the first of four collaborations with Hepburn.[109][q] Though a commercial failure,[111] his dominating performance was praised by critics,[112] and Grant always considered the film to have been the breakthrough for his career.[113]
When his contract with Paramount ended in 1936 with the release of Wedding Present, Grant decided not to renew it and wished to work freelance. Grant claimed to be the first freelance actor in Hollywood and the lack of central contract helped increase his salary to $300,000 per picture.[114] His first venture as a freelance actor was The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (1936), which was shot in England.[113] The film was a box office bomb and prompted Grant to reconsider his decision. Critical and commercial success with Suzy later that year in which he played a French airman opposite Jean Harlow and Franchot Tone, led to him signing joint contracts with RKO and Columbia Pictures, enabling him to choose the stories that he felt suited his acting style.[114] His Columbia contract was a four-film deal over two years, guaranteeing him $50,000 each for the first two and $75,000 each for the others.[115]
Hollywood stardom and Oscar recognition (1937–1944)
In 1937, Grant began the first film under his contract with Columbia Pictures, When You're in Love, portraying a wealthy American artist who eventually woos a famous opera singer (Grace Moore). His performance received positive feedback from critics, with Mae Tinee of The Chicago Daily Tribune describing it as the "best thing he's done in a long time".[116] After a commercial failure in his second RKO venture The Toast of New York,[117][118] Grant was loaned to Hal Roach's studio for Topper, a screwball comedy film distributed by MGM, which became his first major comedy success.[119]
Grant played one half of a wealthy, freewheeling married couple with Constance Bennett,[120] who wreak havoc on the world as ghosts after dying in a car accident.[121] Topper became one of the most popular movies of the year, with a critic from Variety noting that both Grant and Bennett "do their assignments with great skill".[122] Vermilye described the film's success as "a logical springboard" for Grant to star in The Awful Truth that year,[123] his first film made with Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy. Though director Leo McCarey reportedly disliked Grant,[124] who had mocked the director by enacting his mannerisms in the film,[125] he recognized Grant's comic talents and encouraged him to improvize his lines and draw upon his skills developed in vaudeville.[124] The film was a critical and commercial success and made Grant a top Hollywood star,[126] establishing a screen persona for him as a sophisticated light comedy leading man in screwball comedies.[127]
Despite a series of commercial failures, Grant was now more popular than ever and in high demand.[135] According to Vermilye, in 1939, Grant played roles that were more dramatic, albeit with comical undertones.[136] He played a British army sergeant opposite **Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.** in the George Stevens-directed adventure film Gunga Din, set at a military station in India.[137][r] Roles as a pilot opposite Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings,[139] and a wealthy landowner alongside Carole Lombard in In Name Only followed.[140]The Awful Truth began what film critic Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic later called "the most spectacular run ever for an actor in American pictures" for Grant.[128] In 1938, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, featuring a leopard and frequent bickering and verbal jousting between Grant and Hepburn.[129] He was initially uncertain how to play his character, but was told by director Howard Hawks to think of Harold Lloyd.[130] Grant was given more leeway in the comic scenes, the editing of the film and in educating Hepburn in the art of comedy.[131] Despite losing over $350,000 for RKO,[132] the film earned rave reviews from critics.[133] He again appeared with Hepburn in the romantic comedy Holiday later that year, which did not fare well commercially, to the point that Hepburn was considered to be "box office poison" at the time.[134]
In 1940, Grant played a callous newspaper editor who learns that his ex-wife and former journalist, played by Rosalind Russell, is to marry an insurance officer in the comedy His Girl Friday,[141] which was praised for its strong chemistry and "great verbal athleticism" between Grant and Russell.[142][143][s] Grant reunited with Irene Dunne in My Favorite Wife, a "first rate comedy" according to Life magazine,[144] which became RKO's second biggest picture of the year, with profits of $505,000.[145][t] After playing a Virginian backwoodsman in the American Revolution-set The Howards of Virginia, which McCann considers to have been Grant's worst film and performance,[147] his last film of the year was in the critically lauded romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, in which he played the ex-husband of Hepburn's character.[148][149][150] Grant felt his performance was so strong that he was bitterly disappointed not to have received an Oscar nomination, and joked "I'd have to blacken my teeth first before the Academy will take me seriously".[151]
In 1942, Grant participated in a three-week tour of the United States as part of a group to help the war effort and was photographed visiting wounded marines in hospital. He appeared in several routines of his own during these shows and often played the straight-man opposite Bert Lahr.[157] In May 1942, the ten-minute propaganda short Road to Victory was released, in which he appeared alongside Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Charles Ruggles.[158] On film, Grant played Leopold Dilg, a convict on the run in The Talk of the Town (1942), who escapes after being wrongly convicted of arson and murder.
He hides in a house with characters played by Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman, and gradually plots to secure his freedom. Crowther praised the script, and noted that Grant played Dilg with a "casualness which is slightly disturbing".[159] After a role as a foreign correspondent opposite Ginger Rogers and Walter Slezak in the off-beat comedy Once Upon a Honeymoon,[160] in which he was praised for his scenes with Rogers,[161] he appeared in Mr. Lucky the following year, playing a gambler in a casino aboard a ship.[162] The commercially successful submarine war film Destination Tokyo (1943) was shot in just six weeks in the September and October, which left him exhausted;[163] the reviewer from Newsweek thought it was one of the finest performances of his career.[164]The following year Grant was considered for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Penny Serenade—his first nomination from the academy. Wansell claims that Grant found the film to be an emotional experience, because he and wife-to-be Barbara Hutton had started to discuss having their own children.[152]
Later that year he appeared in the romantic psychological thriller Suspicion, the first of Grant's four collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock. Grant did not warm to co-star Joan Fontaine, finding her to be temperamental and unprofessional.[153] Film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times considered that Grant was "provokingly irresponsible, boyishly gay and also oddly mysterious, as the role properly demands".[154] Hitchcock later stated that he thought the ending of the film in which Grant is sent to jail instead of committing suicide "a complete mistake because of making that story with Cary Grant. Unless you have a cynical ending it makes the story too simple".[155] Geoff Andrew of Time Out believes Suspicion served as "a supreme example of Grant's ability to be simultaneously charming and sinister".[156]
In 1944, Grant starred alongsidePriscilla Lane,Raymond MasseyandPeter Lorre,[165] in Frank Capra's dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace,playing the manic Mortimer Brewster, who belongs to a bizarre family which includes two murderous aunts and an uncle claiming to be President Teddy Roosevelt.[166]Grant took up the role after it was originally offered toBob Hope, who turned it down owing to schedule conflicts.[167][168]Grant found the macabre subject matter of the film difficult to contend with and believed that it was the worst performance of his career.[169]That year he received his second Oscar nomination for a role, oppositeEthel BarrymoreandBarry Fitzgeraldin theClifford Odets-directed filmNone but the Lonely Heart, set in London during the Depression.[170]Late in the year he featured in the CBS Radio seriesSuspense, playing a tormented character who hysterically discovers that his amnesia has affected masculine order in society inThe Black Curtain.[171]
Post-War success and slump (1946–1954)
...After making a brief cameo appearance oppositeClaudette ColbertinWithout Reservations(1946),[172]Grant portrayedCole Porterin the musicalNight and Day(1946).[173]The production proved to be problematic, with scenes often requiring multiple takes, frustrating the cast and crew.[173]Grant next appeared with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in the Hitchcock-directed film Notorious(1946), playing a government agent who recruits the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy (Bergman) to infiltrate a Nazi organization in Brazil after World War II.[174]During the course of the film Grant and Bergman's characters fall in love and share one of the longest kisses in film history at around two-and-a-half minutes.[175][176]Wansell notes how Grant's performance "underlined how far his unique qualities as a screen actor had matured in the years sinceThe Awful Truth".[177]
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