Actors - Cary Grant

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	Actors - Cary Grant

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 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.

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 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. Hitchcock, who was notorious for disliking actors, was very fond of Grant, saying that Grant was "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". Howard Hawks was just as devoted, saying 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 via a distribution deal with Universal produced what many consider some of his finest work, including Operation Petticoat
, Indiscreet
, That Touch Of Mink (co-starring Doris Day), and Father Goose.

Grant was a favorite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, appearing in his 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Cary Grant ]

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Actors - Cary Grant

Early life and career

Hollywood stardom

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