Cary Grant bio a perceptive look at captivating star
“Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise” by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster)
Self-trained English actor Archie Leach pulled off the role of a lifetime: becoming Hollywood legend Cary Grant. Why the child of a broken family hid behind the silver screen’s definition of easy charm and handsome masculinity is another story entirely.
In the most entertaining and enlightening star biography in years, writer Scott Eyman poignantly notes the realities behind Grant’s remarkable subterfuge while exploring his phenomenal career.
Despite a heyday more than a half-century ago, his best films wear so well because the appeal of Cary Grant defies time — screwball comedies like “Bringing Up Baby” and “His Girl Friday,” romances like “The Philadelphia Story” and “An Affair to Remember,” the adventure “Gunga Din” or any of his four Alfred Hitchcock films.
As Eyman explains, young Archie Leach endured an impoverished childhood in his native Bristol, England, his father a negligent drinker who placed the 11-year-old’s mother in an asylum while telling him she had died. In his teens, Archie found solace in the local music hall. Eventually he left school to join a troupe of tumblers and traveled the English countryside, in time sailing to America and working in vaudeville, all the while honing a sense of how to make people laugh.
His dark good looks fit nicely with the romance-infused light operas popular in New York theater. Then Hollywood came calling. In 1932, the year he turned 28, he appeared in his first feature film, with a new name. More than two dozen roles built up his romantic and comedic chops until 1937’s “Topper” and “The Awful Truth” sent his career into a stratosphere it never left.
Grant struggled with feelings of inadequacy and fear of abandonment. He learned from his father that his mother wasn’t dead after all. Grant moved her into private accommodations in Bristol, but she remained mentally fragile and an emotional drain on her son.
On sets, his nitpicking about costumes and camera angles could drive colleagues crazy. His tendency to save a dollar was legendary. Guests at his home could find half-eaten sandwiches in the fridge and buttons clipped from old shirts.
His many affairs and failed marriages — he died at 82 in 1986 while married to his fifth wife — were likely casualties of his tendency to drive women away before they could leave him.
