Cary Grant Tribute

Archibald Alexander Leach was born in Horfield, Bristol, England in 1904. An only child, he had a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother Elsie (who had apparently never overcome her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy), was placed by his father in a mental institution when Archie was ten. His father (who had a son with another woman) told him that she had gone away on a "long vacation", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.

After being expelled from Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol in 1918 (for investigating the girls' bathroom), he joined the Bob Pender stage troupe and travelled with the group to the United States in 1920 for a two-year tour. When the troupe returned to England, he decided to stay in the U.S. and continue his stage career. Still as Archie Leach, he performed on the stage at The Muny in St. Louis, Missouri, in such shows as Irene (1931); Music in May (1931); Nina Rosa (1931); Rio Rita (1931); Street Singer (1931); The Three Musketeers (1931); and Wonderful Night (1931).

Over time, he created a unique accent and persona that mixed working and upper class accents, while supporting himself as a hawker and a male escort for socialites.

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 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. Grant finally received a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970. 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 and died.

Grant's personal life was complicated, involving five marriages and rumors regarding his sexual orientation.

Grant's first wife was actress Virginia Cherrill. They married on February 10, 1934, and divorced on March 26, 1935 following charges that Grant had hit her.

After becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1942, Grant married ultra-wealthy socialite Barbara Hutton, becoming a surrogate father and lifelong influence on her son, Lance Reventlow, who later died in a plane crash. The couple were derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary", although in an extensive prenuptial agreement Grant refused any financial settlement in the event of a divorce. After divorcing in 1945, they remained lifelong friends.

Grant's third wife was actress Betsy Drake (born September 11, 1923), with whom he appeared in two films. This was his longest marriage (December 25, 1949 - August 14, 1962). Drake introduced Grant to LSD, and in the early '60s he related how treatment with the hallucinogenic drug at a prestigious California clinic — legal at the time — had finally brought him inner peace after yoga, hypnotism, and mysticism had proved ineffective.

His fourth marriage to actress Dyan Cannon (thirty-three years his junior) took place on July 22, 1965 in Las Vegas, and was followed by the premature birth of his only child, Jennifer Grant, on February 26, 1966 when Grant was sixty-two (he frequently called her his "best production", and regretted that he hadn't had children sooner). The marriage was troubled from the beginning and Cannon left him in December 1966 claiming that Grant flew into frequent rages and spanked her when she "disobeyed" him. The divorce, finalized in 1968, was bitter and public, and custody fights over their daughter went on for about ten years.

On April 11, 1981 Grant married his long-time companion, British hotel PR agent Barbara Harris, who was forty-seven years his junior; she was by his side when he died.

Throughout his time in Hollywood, Grant was rumoured to be homosexual or bisexual. In 1932 he met fellow actor Randolph Scott on the set of Hot Saturday, and the two shared a rented beach house (known as "Bachelor Hall") on and off for twelve years. Rumors ran rampant at the time that Grant and Scott were lovers. Authors Marc Elliot, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley consider Grant to have been bisexual, with Higham and Moseley claiming that Grant and Scott were seen kissing in a public carpark outside a social function both attended in the 1960s. In his book, Hollywood Gays, Boze Hadleigh cites an interview with homosexual director George Cukor, who said about the alleged homosexual relationship between Scott and Grant: "Oh, Cary won't talk about it. At most, he'll say they did some wonderful pictures together. But Randolph will admit it – to a friend."

Homosexual screenwriter Arthur Laurents indicated that Grant was bisexual. In his memoir, he says, Grant "told me he threw pebbles at my window one night but was luckless-I wasn't home. ... his eyes and his smile implied that ... he would have liked doing what we would have done had I been home. William J. Mann's book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 recounts how photographer Jerome Zerbe spent "three gay months" (his words) in the movie colony taking many photographs of Grant and Scott, "attesting to their involvement in the gay scene." Zerbe says that he often stayed with the two actors, "finding them both warm, charming, and happy." In addition, Darwin Porter's book, Brando Unzipped (2006) claims that Grant had a homosexual affair with Marlon Brando.

Many writers seem to have no doubt about the actor's bisexuality; Grant, however, did not identify himself as such. He had many gay friends, including Cukor, William Haines, and Australian artist and costume designer Orry-Kelly, but when comedian Chevy Chase joked about Grant being gay in a television interview with Tom Snyder in 1980 ("Oh, what a gal!") Grant sued him for slander; they settled out of court. Grant complained to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich about the Chevy Chase incident, emphatically insisting that he was not gay, and that while he had nothing against homosexuals, he was simply not one himself (this exchange is cited at length in the chapter on Grant in Bogdanovich's 2005 book Who the Hell's in It?).

In a 2004 interview for the Turner Classic Movies production, Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Grant's third wife, Betsy Drake, mocks the rumors, saying, "I didn't have time to think about his homosexuality. We were too busy fucking".