| Cary Grant
Iconography Biog. Gallery Trivia North By Northwest To Catch A Thief Sig. Coll. Boxset Dvds July 13: Added a 'Trivia' section with fascinating facts and rumours on Cary Grant. Just added details of his own personal favourite list of his movies, the original ending of 'Suspicion', the mystery of Cary Grant's mother's disappearance; why he was circumcised; details of the death of his brother, John, four years before his birth; Deborah Kerr quote; one of the last visits to Bristol; his thoughts on death; and his death. Read more here. Cary Grant - A Class Apart Book Scans | Marc Eliot Biography Book Scans In 2004 Cary Grant, one of Hollywood's most celebrated actors, would have been 100. To mark his anniversary, May's Cannes Film Festival momentarily turned the full force of its flashbulb-popping attention on the icon at the premiere of a new feature-length documentary about his eventful life and career. The film, predicably enough, is packed with industry players paying homage to Grant, star of such Hollywood classics as North By Northwest, To Catch A Thief and The Philadelphia Story...more Biography But it is also spiced up with references to Grant's extraordinary marital record - he had five wives - and speculation about whether or not he was bisexual. Bizarrely, between marriages, he spurned his own bachelor home and chose to live instead with a rugged actor named Randolph Scott, prompting inevitable rumours. The premiere's guest of honour was Grant's widow Barbara. Grant died in 1986 and there was a period when she had difficulty coping with hearing his voice, let alone seeing his movies, but she has overcome the loss. She says: After his death at the age of 82, Barbara found she couldn't even bear to remain in the Los Angeles bachelor house that became the couple's marital home. 'I moved out for a time to readjust to a life suddenly without him, but I've returned again. Cary bought it in 1946, but I think some of his wives didn't think it was quite grand enough. So, whenever he got married, he'd go and live somewhere else with them to try and keep them happy.' Barbara was born in East Africa, attending an English boarding school from the age of ten. She met Grant in 1976 when she was head of public relations for the Royal Lancaster Hotel in west London. He stayed there on visits to London as a director of Faberge. She was 28 and he was 75. 'We liked each other from the start,' she says, 'but for two years we were just great friends. I never envisaged having any other kind of relationship with him, but because he was such an extraordinary individual, regardless of the 47-year-age gap, I couldn't stop falling in love with him. even though I knew that our time together would probaly be limited, the quality of it was extraordinarily important to me and I wouldn't have changed it for the world. 'At the beginning, when we were just friends,' she says, 'Cary would call from the U.S. to tell me he was coming over, and I would take him down to see his relatives in Bristol and to see my parents. He would come in my Mini. He would be sitting with his knees up to his nose because he was so tall. I instantly liked him as a person. We used to have great fun just talking and laughing. He would ask me for more personal details about my life. I had a boyfriend and he used to tease me about him.' Two years after they first met, Grant was invited to Princess Caroline's wedding in Monaco. 'Gregory Peck and his family, the Sinatras - everyone was there, and they were all at a famous restaurant called La Chaumiere up in the hills,' says Barbara. 'One of them said to Cary, "You're all by yourself. Isn't there anyone you'd like to have here?" and he said, "Yes, there is, but she won't have anything to do with me." And that was sort of true because, although I did enjoy his company immensely, he was so much older than me. 'But his friends persuaded him to call me to see if I would agree to join him in France. He was convinced I wouldn't want to, but I agreed to give it a try. 'At first I wasn't sure and hesitated, and then I suddenly decided, "Yes, I'd love to come over." It was then that the whole relationship started for us. We stayed in a lovely hotel and I spent a lot of time in Gregory Peck's house while Cary was at the wedding. Afterwards, he hurried back to be with me.' Although Barbara found herself surrounded by the cream of Hollywood who had arrived for the royal wedding, it appears she wasn't fazed by any of it. 'It doesn't matter what field they're in,' she says, 'you either like people or you don't. I've always been far more interested in the person than I was in the name. Both with Cary and anyone else I met.' Even when Grant decided he wanted Barbara to go over to Los Angeles to see if she would like to live there with him, she went for three weeks to test the water. 'He showed me everything, introduced me to all his friends, and by then I was absolutely caught. I moved to the U.S. to be with Cary.' The couple married in 1981. Grant was 77 and Barbara was 30. Before proposing, Grant decided to visit his daughter, Jennifer, whom he'd had with his fourth wife Dyan Cannon. Jennifer was still at school and Grant wanted to find out how she would feel about him marying Barbara. 'Apparently, Jennifer burst into tears,' says Barbara. 'To begin with Cary thought she was upset, but, to his relief, it was tears of joy.' She later learned Jennifer was hugely relieved that her father had at last found someone he could be happy with. Two weeks after he visited his daughter, Cary proposed. 'He did actually go down on his knee,' says Barbara, laughing at the recollection. The closer Barbara came to Grant, the less important the age difference became. She says: In contrast to Barbara's experiences, some stars in the new documentary claim it was hard to get beyond the Cary Grant image - and he was certainly protective of the persona he created that charmed cinema audiences. He rarely gave interviews and avoided chat shows. It is said Ian Fleming modelled the James Bond character with Grant in mind, but Grant turned down the flattering role. Yet Barbara says, 'For me he was so open. He would talk about himself, about anything. I thought he was very easy to get to know.' But Grant did put an extraordinary distance between his Hollywood status and poor childhood. He was born Archibald Leach in 1904 to Elias Leach, who earned his money pressing suits and progressed too slowly to satisy his wife Elsie's dreams. The family was trying to make a living in what was then the slums of Bristol; Elsie suffered a mental breakdown in 1914 and, when she suddenly vanished, her son was told she had gone on holiday. His father decided it was better to have his nine-year-old son believe he had been abandoned that know his mother was committed to a mental asylum. At 16, after being expelled from school, he joined a comedy troupe travelling across Britain. This was where he learned pantomine and pratfalls, and the brilliant comic timing he was to call on for his lighter film roles. After the troupe did a stint in the U.S., Grant decided to stay on. 'It was very tough, he had hardly any money at all. He would do anything from stilt-walking to selling ties on street corners,' says Barbara. He performed in theatres until landing a studio contract with Paramount, taking the first name Cary from a character he played in a Broadway stage play and his surname from a list of studio suggestions. Almost immediately he won major roles alongside Hollywood's most glamourous leading ladies, including Carole Lombard and Marlene Dietrich. It didn't take long for Mae West to spot him and cast him as her love interest in She Done Him Wrong. Off screen, he wed actress Virginia Cherrill in 1934 after a whirlwind romance - but they were divorced after less than a year, with Grant returning to the Malibu beach house he had previously been shaing with handsome Western star Randolph Scott. But the camera still loved him and he went on to co-star with Deborah Kerr, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren. In the late 1930s he was even reunited with his mother, having discovered she was still living in the same institution she had been taken to following her breakdown. Relations were strained between mother and son - despite his fame she didn't know him, but he supported her for the rest of her life. Grant's second marriage was to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton; it only lasted three years. She wanted Grant to be constantly by her side and hated it when he went off filming. He left without taking a penny of her fortune. In the documentary, it is third wife Betsy Drake who alludes to the rumours about Grant and Randolph Scott. In it, she says, 'For goodness sake why would I believe Cary was homosexual when we busy enjoying sex?' But she goes on to say, 'Maybe he was bisexual. He lived 43 years before he met me. I don't know what he did.' Barbara will have none of it. 'People were saying, "Oh, my goodness, there must be something going on between the two men." It wasn't the case at all. The house was known to have women going in and out like running water. Once a rumour starts it is just perpetuated. As Cary would say, "If someone can't find anything bad to say about you, you are a tightwad or a homosexual."' What is certainly true is that Grant and Scott were rarely alone - the house they shared was also occupied by Scott's wife, to whom he was married for 43 years before his death in 1987. In 1965, Grant married Dyan Cannon, becoming a father at the age of 62 with the birth of Jennifer. Barbara says: Barbara, in marked contrast, says she and Grant often wished they could have had more time together. Now 52, one of her biggest regrets was that she never had a child of her own. 'We did talk about it and we were trying to have a baby. In fact, when he died, that very month we thought that I was pregnant. But if I was, I lost the baby.' She has never forgotten the day Grant died. She was travelling with him on one of his lecture tours. 'During a rehearsal I noticed that he was becoming a little bit confused, and that wasn't like him. He called me up on to the stage and asked me to stay with him. Then he said he really wanted to go and just rest, and walked off into the dressing room area It was at that stage that I realised there was something seriously wrong. We called for an ambulance. At the hospital they said he was having a massive stroke. He could have died in his bed at home, he could have died anywhere. But he was on the road and at least he was doing something that he loved to do.' On his death, Barbara inherited his house and shares with his daughter the multi-million-pound fortune he left behind. (Barbara's share was about £30 million). She remarried in 2001, to American businessman David Jaynes. 'Cary made me listen to him. He used to sit me down and say, "I'm not going to be here for all your life and when I'm not here, I want you to marry. I want you to love again and I want you to be very happy." Wasn't that the most generous thing in the world?' Cary Grant Collection - The Best Looking Dvd Boxset ... Ever Cary Grant Signature Collection - 5-Dvd UK Boxset North by Northwest Photo Gallery Cary Grant autographs, photographs and more @ ebay.com (direct link to photographs) Cary Grant: A Class Apart, is out now on DVD, on Warner Home Video as part of the Cary Grant Signature Collecton box set, which includes Night and Day, Destination Tokyo, Arsenic and Old Lace and North by Northwest To Catch A Thief Posters: | North by Northwest Posters: Cary Grant - A Class Apart Book Scans Cary Grant autographs, photographs and more @ ebay.com (direct link to photographs) All the Cary Grant facts you will need! Trivia has been sourced from the definitive book Cary Grant: A Class Apart By Graham McCann What had really happened to Elsie Leach was that her husband had committed her to the local lunatic asylum, the Country Home for Mental Defectives in Fishponds, a rustic district at the end of one of Bristol's main tramlines. Elias had arranged for the hospital's staff to collect her from their home earlier in the day, and then, after settling her in, he went back to work. He never told his son the truth about the matter. The asylum at Fishponds ws, by quite some way, the worst of the two institutions for the mentally ill in Bristol at that time. Conditions were filthy, and supervision negligible. It cost Elias one pound per year to keep Elsie inside as a patient. She stayed there for more than twenty years, until, in fact, her husband's death in the mid-1930s...more in the book The ending that Hitchcock intended featured Grant's character, Johnie Ayegarth bringing his wife a glass of poisoned milk; just before she drinks it, she hands him a letter in a sealed envelope for him to mail. The letter names him as a murderer. Then, still in love with the man she knows is her killer, she drinks the poison. 'I thought the original was marvellous,' Grant remarked. 'It was a perfect Hitchcock ending. But the studio insisted that they didn't want to have Cary Grant play a murderer.' Website note: Imagine those films if Grant had played those roles in light of Suspicion, especially the former. Now Cotten was good in the role but Grant would have taken it to another level. So against 'type' it would have been explosive. Sometimes you wish Hollywood had been a bit braver in casting as that is something that would have lived long in the memory. If you read about the studio system, particularly with Grant, it did rob us of some great performances. For example, Grant was refused permission to appear in Frank Loy's Muting on the Bounty, made by MGM (he was signed to Paramount). There are many more examples... Website note: Just came into my head: imagine if Archie Leach had never invented Cary Grant. Can you imagine a world where there had been no Cary Grant? The big screen would have a big empty hole in it as, if you think about it, there was nobody who could, even remotely, replace him. Website note: interestingly, the award was not made public at the time. Cary Grant Prints |
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