Home › Arts & Letters › Film, Television & Comedy
Cary Grant
1904–1986 · 82 years
An acrobat from Bristol who invented Cary Grant and then became him
When Archibald Leach was nine, his father put his mother into a Bristol mental hospital, told the boy she had gone away on a long holiday, and later told him she was dead. She was neither. Grant did not learn she was alive until he was 31, when his father confessed the lie shortly before dying. Before that he had already found the exit. He befriended a troupe of acrobatic dancers called the Penders, learned stilt-walking and tumbling, and was expelled from Fairfield Grammar School on March 13, 1918. He rejoined the troupe three days later, and sailed with it for New York in July 1920, aged 16. Every pratfall he took on film for the next 40 years came out of that apprenticeship.
Nothing he is known for happened in England. The more than 70 films were American, the money was American, and the citizenship came on June 26, 1942, the same day he legally stopped being Archibald Leach. Paramount had signed him in December 1931 and picked the new name for the marquee. What followed was the run: the screwball comedies with Irene Dunne and Katharine Hepburn, four pictures for Alfred Hitchcock, two Academy Award nominations and no competitive win. He stayed a top box-office draw for close to 30 years.
He put it plainly: "I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person, or he became me." The manner was assembled out of Douglas Fairbanks, English music halls and a decade of vaudeville, and the accent belonged to no country on earth. He did the same to the business. When his Paramount contract expired in 1936 he refused another long-term deal, worked non-exclusively for Columbia and RKO, chose his own scripts and directors, and later took a percentage of the gross. Every star who owns a piece of a picture is working off that. Then he set about taking the invention apart, running through roughly 100 supervised LSD sessions from the late 1950s with a doctor named Mortimer Hartman, and saying so in public when nobody did.
He quit at 62. Jennifer was born on February 26, 1966, and he left the screen to raise her, turning Hitchcock down flat. Whether he was bisexual has been argued over since the years he shared a house with Randolph Scott, biographers disagree, and Grant denied it, suing Chevy Chase for slander in 1980 over a joke about it. He collapsed at a theater in Davenport, Iowa, on November 29, 1986, refused the hospital, and died of a stroke that night. The reputation has only risen since: the American Film Institute ranked him second among the male stars of the studio era in 1999, and Bristol, which he left at 16, put up a statue of him in 2001.
Lifespan
Cary Grant's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
She Done Him Wrong
film
Opposite Mae West, and one of the pictures that kept Paramount solvent 1933 -
The Awful Truth
film
Leo McCarey told him to improvise, and the screen persona arrived 1937 -
Bringing Up Baby
film
With Katharine Hepburn and a leopard. It lost RKO over 350,000 dollars 1938 -
Notorious
film
The second Hitchcock, and the coldest part he ever took 1946 -
To Catch a Thief
film
He took 10 percent of the gross and cleared more than 700,000 dollars 1955 -
North by Northwest
film
Hitchcock again, and the Savile Row suit 1959
Life in brief
with age at each point- c. 1913 aged ~9 His father commits his mother to Glenside Hospital Grant was nine. He was told she had gone away on a long holiday, and later that she had died.
- March 13, 1918 aged 14 Expelled from Fairfield Grammar School at 14 He rejoined Bob Pender's acrobatic troupe three days later, on a three-year contract his father co-signed.
- July 21, 1920 aged 16 Sails for New York with the Pender Troupe Aboard the RMS Olympic, aged 16. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were on the same ship, returning from their honeymoon.
- December 7, 1931 aged 27 Signs a five-year Paramount contract and is renamed Four hundred and fifty dollars a week. B. P. Schulberg wanted a name that sounded American, and they settled on Cary Grant.
- June 1935 aged 31 Arranges his mother's release from the institution He had found out at 31 that she was alive. He visited her regularly for the rest of her life.
- June 26, 1942 aged 38 Becomes a United States citizen at 38 On the same papers he legally changed his name from Archibald Alec Leach to Cary Grant.
- February 26, 1966 aged 62 His daughter Jennifer is born and he retires from film He turned down Hitchcock's Torn Curtain that year. Walk, Don't Run was his last picture.
- 1970 aged ~66 Accepts an honorary Academy Award from Frank Sinatra He never won a competitive Oscar. Accepting this one ended a 12-year boycott of the ceremony.
- November 29, 1986 aged 82 Dies of a stroke in Davenport, Iowa He was taken ill preparing for his one-man show A Conversation with Cary Grant, and refused to be taken to hospital.
Related
Contemporaries
Arts & Letters, born within 25 years
Count Basie 1904–1984Arts & LettersKansas City bandleader whose rhythm section reset what a big band could swing like.
Dr. Seuss 1904–1991Arts & LettersAuthor and illustrator whose rhythmic books transformed American children’s reading and publishing.
Isamu Noguchi 1904–1988Arts & LettersSculptor and designer whose works blend Japanese and American modernist traditions.
Willem de Kooning 1904–1997Arts & LettersAbstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School.
Ayn Rand 1905–1982Arts & LettersNovelist and philosopher whose defense of individualism and capitalism deeply influenced American conservative and libertarian thought.
Henry Fonda 1905–1982Arts & LettersPlayed the plain American conscience for five decades — Tom Joad, Juror 8, Mister Roberts — and won his only Oscar at 76.