In the Gold Age of Hollywood, Cary Grant was a household name. A gentleman with excellent comedic timing and a swoon-worthy transatlantic accent, Grant was the go-to leading man for any director producing a romantic comedy. His best-known films, including Bringing Up the Baby, North By Northwest and To Catch a Thief, are still enjoyed by fans today, decades after his death.
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach in Bristol, England, January 18th, 1904. His father Elias worked in a clothes factory and his mother Elsie was a seamstress. Grant had a difficult childhood, far from the glitz and glamour he would experience later in life. His father was an alcoholic, whilst his mother struggled with severe depression. Prior to Grant’s birth, he had had an older brother named John, who had sadly died from tuberculous meningitis shortly before his own birthday. Multiple biographers have described Grant’s mother as emotionally withdrawn and strict, perhaps as a consequence of fear that she would lose Grant as she had his brother.
Grant’s childhood grew even more fraught when he returned home one day, age nine, to be told by his father that his mother had run away to the seaside. A few months later his father would change his story again, claiming that she had instead died. Both were lies, infact, Grant’s father had had his mother committed to a mental asylum so that he could obtain a divorce and remarry. He only told Grant the truth on his deathbed, after which Grant found his mother and they reconnected. This, understandably, had a profound impact on Grant’s psyche. "He had such a traumatic childhood, it was horrible,’ explained his ex-wife, Cannon, in one interview, ‘[...] I've heard a lot of stories about what happens when a family breaks down — but this was just horrendous."
Grant’s formal career began in 1920 when he started to perform with The Pender Troupe, who had scouted him after seeing him in a production in his hometown. The tour moved to the USA, where Grant would reside for the rest of his life. During the 1920s he enjoyed a successful run on Broadway. It wasn’t until 1931 that Grant began to experience studio interest, and so moved to Hollywood to explore his options with Paramount Studios. It was Paramount who gave him the name Cary Grant, and set him on the path to fame.
His first film, This Is the Night, premiered in 1932. Grant played an Olympic javelin thrower with a jealous streak where his wife, played by Thelma Todd, is concerned. Grant reportedly hated this role and threatened to leave his contract with Paramount, however, after its success at the box office and with critics he seemed to change his mind. After this Grant took typically comedic roles in feel-good romantic pictures. Film critic William Rothman described Grant as having a "distinctive kind of non-macho masculinity that was to enable him to incarnate a man capable of being a romantic hero". Throughout his career he acted in over fifty films, opposite some of the most famous actors in Hollywood history, including Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn.
Not one to waste his time on a long engagement, Grant married five times. First to Virginia Cherill (1934), then wealthy heiress Barbara Hutton (1942), then fellow actor Betsy Drake (1949), then the mother of his only child, actress Dyan Cannon; they were married in 1965 but separated only a year after the birth of their daughter Jennifer. The birth of his daughter signaled the end of his acting career; "I could have gone on acting and playing a grandfather or a bum, but I discovered more important things in life," he told one interviewer.
He was 62 years old and ready to step back from the spotlight and be there for his daughter, with whom he was incredibly close. After retiring from acting, Grant remained active, serving on the board of directors for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and working as a representative for Fabergé cosmetics. Fabergé allowed him access to a private jet, which he could use to visit Jennifer wherever her mother was filming. In 1981 Grant married his final wife, Barbara Harris, who was 47 years his junior. The pair had met through his work with Fabergé, and they remained married until his death.
Outside of and during his marriages, Grant had affairs with men, including actor Randolph "Randy" Scott who he lived with on and off for twelve years. They had met at the Paramount Studios set whilst filming for separate projects. Actor Scotty Bowers claimed to have slept with both Grant and Scott, and Grant had also previously lived with openly gay designer Orry-Kelly. "He had been influenced by the Kinsey report and saw sex as a spectrum. Most people think it’s either/or," explained Grant’s close friend Bill Royce, "I remember one thing Cary said: England is Victorian, but America is more Victorian than England." Royce also suggested that as Grant grew older he had less affairs with men, due to his increasing stardom (along with which came a greater risk of being outed) and also a desire to have a child.
On 29th November 1986, Whilst waiting to go on stage for his touring show A Conversation with Cary Grant, Grant was taken ill. He expressed feeling fatigued, and was stumbling as he walked. After half an hour of rehearsals, he left the stage and requested he be driven back to the hotel where he had been staying. Once there, he was attended to by a doctor who realized he was having a serious stroke; yet Grant refused to be taken to hospital. "The stroke was getting worse," the doctor recalled, "In only fifteen minutes he deteriorated rapidly. It was terrible watching him die and not being able to help. But he wouldn't let us." Around 8:45 Grant slipped into a coma and was transferred quickly to a hospital, but sadly, he never regained consciousness. He died with his wife by his side. He was 82 years old.
"Cary Grant was not supposed to die," The New York Times wrote in memoriam, "Cary Grant was supposed to stick around, our perpetual touchstone of charm and elegance and romance and youth." In his films, for which he won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970, Grant lives on in perpetual youth. Director Alfred Hitchcock affectionately referred to him as "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life", a sentiment shared by many of those who worked with him. In his Academy Award acceptance speech, Grant said "You know that I've never been a joiner or a member of any particular social set, but I've been privileged to be a part of Hollywood's most glorious era." Little did he realize how much he had made it so.
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