Grant, Cary

1904–1986

Actor

During the 1940s and 1950s, Cary Grant became the model of urbane, heterosexual masculinity for a generation of American filmgoers. Standing over six feet tall, Grant was strikingly handsome, and he was often cast as an upper-class character— such as C. K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story (1940)— whose charms made him irresistible to women. A popular romantic leading man from the 1930s through the 1960s, Grant's image of on-screen manhood evolved from that of a screwball comedian, featuring physical gags and self-deprecating wit, to that of a tanned, suave, self-contained hero.

Born in Bristol, England, as Archibald Alexander Leach, Grant grew up in modest circumstances. Coming to the United States in 1920, he found work on Broadway in New York City. By the 1930s he had moved to California and begun to appear in films—and changed his name at his studio's request.

Grant appeared in more than eighty films from 1932 to 1966. His early roles tended toward light comedy. The actress Mae West famously invited Grant to “come up and see me” in She Done Him Wrong (1933). The early Grant's screen image differed significantly from his later roles. In Sylvia Scarlett (1935), for instance, Grant plays a Cockney con man: sympathetic, funny, but hardly elegant. By the 1940s, however, Grant appeared as the romantic lead opposite his generation's best actresses. His characters from this period conveyed the idealized masculine type for which Grant is best remembered: handsome, graceful, elegant, stylish, and witty.

Grant's personal life was more complicated than his savoir-faire screen image would suggest, and he found it difficult to attain the ease and assurance that his film roles and publicity conveyed. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” the actor once said, “even I want to be Cary Grant” (McCann, xi). For years he was reticent in speaking about private matters. Yet even as he became an icon of American manhood, his sexuality became the object of fascination and speculation. He shared a house for a time with the actor Randolph Scott, and gossip linked the two romantically. Grant's career was dependent on the overt heterosexuality of his characters, however, and he refused to address such rumors. In his early roles, Grant did play his masculinity broadly and with humor, particularly in [Page 194]screwball comedies such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), in which Grant, attired in a woman's dressing gown, famously claimed, “I just went gay all of a sudden!”

In the 1950s, Grant starred in a series of critical and popular successes, including To Catch a Thief (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), Indiscreet (1958), and North By Northwest (1959). His calm, capable, and assured characters, whether retired cat burglars or playboys, relied on wit and intelligence rather than coarse physicality. In a post–World War II America that imagined itself as mature and worldly, Grant's image of grace under pressure represented American manhood as most American men (and women) imagined it could be.