Archibald Alexander Leach (January 18, 1904 - November 29, 1986), better known by his screen name, Cary Grant, was a British-born American film actor. He was perhaps the foremost exemplar of the debonair leading man, not only handsome, but witty and charming.

Early life and career

Archie Leach was born in Horfield, Bristol, England. He attended Bishop Road Primary School as a young child. He was an only child and had a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother, Elsie, was placed in a mental institution when Archie was only nine. His father never told him the truth, and he only learned twenty years later that his mother was still alive. He frequently returned to Bristol to visit her until her death.

This left Leach/Grant with an insecurity in his relations with women and a secretiveness about his inner life that may explain the outward displays of bravado and charm that characterize most of his screen performances, in films as different as The Philadelphia Story and Notorious.

Grant's unhappy childhood, by his own account, led him to crave applause and attention and to create a new persona that would attract it. After being expelled from Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol in 1918 for an incident involving the girls' bathroom, he joined the Bob Pender stage troupe. Grant traveled with the troupe to the United States in 1920 for a two year tour; when the troupe returned to Britain, Grant stayed in the States. There, he created over time a unique accent and persona that mixed working and upper class accents, while supporting himself as, among other things, a hawker.

Hollywood stardom

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, 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, established 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 subsequently took that character in a far darker direction in Suspicion, directed by Hitchcock, without losing his charm or his audience's devotion.

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 is. There isn't anybody to be compared to him". 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.

Grant was a favorite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, who was notorious for disliking actors, saying that Grant was "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". Grant appeared Hitchcock's films Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief (with Grace Kelly) and North by Northwest (with Eva Marie Saint). The latter was Grant's most successful movie; he plays an advertising agent who gets mistaken for a spy in a classic story of an average person caught up in situations beyond his or her control.

Grant aged extremely well; many fans believe that he got more handsome with age, as his hair went from dark to a salt and pepper colour that added to his dignified appearance.

Although twice nominated for an Academy Award, he never won but was honored in 1970 with a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1981, he received the Kennedy Center Honors.

In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the United States with his "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would show clips from his films and afterward hold a question-and-answer session with the audience. It was just before one of these performances, in Davenport, Iowa, that Grant suffered a severe stroke (November 29, 1986), and died in the hospital a few hours later at the age of 82.

Personal life in Hollywood

Grant's personal life was complicated, involving five marriages and speculation about his sexuality.

In 1932 he met fellow actor Randolph Scott on the set of Hot Saturday, and the two developed a close friendship, sharing a rented house for twelve years. The beach house they shared was known as "Bachelor Hall" and was frequently visited by women guests. However, rumors ran rampant at the time that Grant and Scott were actually lovers and that the name "Bachelor Hall" was invented by the studio to shield their two major stars from scandal. The story was dismissed by at least one of his wives, Betsy Drake, as unfounded.

Biographers disagree on whether Grant was bisexual. While 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 were attending in the 1960s, Graham McCann dismisses the claims as rumors. In his book, Hollywood Gays, Boze Hadleigh cites an interview with gay 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." According to screenwriter Arthur Laurents, Grant was "at best bisexual". 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 his book, Brando Unzipped (2006), Darwin Porter paints Marlon Brando as a prize lothario, romping his way through Hollywood with the biggest names, both male and female. He claims that Brando had a homosexual affair with Cary Grant.

Many writers seem to have no doubt about the actor's bisexuality. Although Grant had many gay friends, including William Haines and Australian artist Orry-Kelly, there is no conclusive evidence that he was bisexual, as the star never outed himself. However at the start of his film career outing himself was not an option. Will Hays, author of the Hays Code which censored "indecent" references in films, notably references to homosexuality, admitted in the 1930s to keeping a "Doom Book" of actors he considered "unsafe" because of their personal lives.[1] As gay film director James Whale discovered, being featured in Hays's list could instantly end a career, with studios dropping those on the list from their employment for fear of criticism from Hays and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency.

Grant was the first to use the word "gay" meaning homosexual context on screen, in an ad-lib during a take that was kept in the film. Its meaning was not fully grasped by censors and so it slipped by the Hays code. In the famous 1938 screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby, he appears in one scene wearing a pink dressing gown, telling incredulous observers "I've just gone gay all of the sudden".[2]

Grant's first wife was actress Virginia Cherrill. They married on February 10, 1934, and divorced just over a year later on 26 March 1935.

Grant became a naturalized citizen of the United States on June 26, 1942. Two weeks later, he married the extremely wealthy socialite Barbara Hutton and became the surrogate father of, and lifelong influence on, her son, Lance Reventlow. The couple was derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary". However, when he and Hutton divorced in 1945, Grant refused to accept any money from her and they remained friends.

Grant's third wife was Betsy Drake. This was his longest marriage, beginning on December 25, 1949, and ending in divorce on August 14, 1962.

In the September, 1959 issue of Look magazine, Grant related how treatment with LSD 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 was to actress Dyan Cannon, July 22, 1965, in Las Vegas, with whom he had his only child, daughter Jennifer Grant (who would later become an actress herself). The marriage was troubled from the beginning: Cannon, who was 28 at the time, and Grant, then 61, did not get along after their honeymoon in Bristol. Cannon filed for divorce less than two years later, claiming "brutal and inhuman treatment." The divorce, finalized on May 28, 1967, was bitter and messy.

Grant's final marriage was to Barbara Harris. The marriage lasted from 11 April 1981 until Grant's death.

When he died in 1986, Grant's cremated ashes were given to his family.