Definitive biography marks the 117th birthday of Bristol’s most famous son: Cary Grant

Much has been written about the former Achibald Leach over the years. But now the definitive biography of Bristol’s most famous son has just been published.

Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend (Oxford University Press, £22.99) by Mark Glancy, reader in film history at Queen Mary University of London, is an exhaustively researched, highly readable account of the personal and professional life of the man who’s been described as “the best and most important actor in the history of cinema”.

On what would have been Cary’s 117th birthday on Monday, January 18, Mark gives an illustrated online talk about the star’s formative years in Bristol.

This will be followed by a Q&A and panel discussion with Cary Comes Home Festival director Charlotte Crofts, chaired by Andrew Kelly (Bristol Festival of Ideas).

The event is being run on a ‘pay what you feel’ basis. Go here for tickets and further information.

Read on for our author interview.

Author and film historian Mark Glancy

You gained access to Cary Grant’s personal vault for your research. What was your most useful discovery?

I was fascinated to read his correspondence with Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and others, but I was most surprised to find a huge stack of letters to and from his mother. They had a difficult relationship. When he was 11, she suddenly disappeared and he was told that she was dead. Then, when he was nearly 30, he discovered that she had been in an asylum all along. He got her out of the asylum, but she continued to live in Bristol while he was in California. Over the course of three decades (she lived to be 95!) they wrote to each other regularly. The letters are always affectionate, but it is also plain to see how awkward it was to rebuild their relationship after being separated for so long.

Archie’s mum Elsie Leach, who was later committed to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum (now part of UWE’s Glenside campus)

Were there any strings attached by Grant’s widow? Did she, for example, want to see the manuscript before the book was published?

No strings at all. I met Barbara Grant because I was involved in making the documentary Becoming Cary Grant (2017). I had to convince her that I was writing a serious, investigative biography, but once I managed that, she was very supportive of my research and, I think, interested to see what I would find about his early life. She didn’t ask for or receive any editorial control over the book.

Archie Leach pictured in Bristol, circa 1910

How much research did you do in Bristol about young Archie Leach’s childhood and what was the most interesting thing this turned up?

I lived in Bristol for several years, and my curiosity about his Bristol background was a big inspiration for writing the book. I did a lot of research there. The most interesting “find” was in the Bristol Archive, which holds the records of the old Bristol Lunatic Asylum. The asylum records were incredibly sad to read, but finding out what happened to his mother – how, when and why she was committed and released – is a very important part of the book.

The acrobatic Pender Troupe of ‘knockabout comedians’ pictured in 1918. Archie’s in the front row, far right. He first encountered the Troupe at the Bristol Empire and later joined as an apprentice.

Your assessment of efforts by previous biographers is quite withering. What, in your view, is the worst falsehood that they have perpetrated?

A lot of the books about Cary Grant read like historical fiction to me. That is, they are set in the past and they involve real people and events, but the authors invent circumstances, motives, relationships, and whole conversations in order to tell a melodramatic story. They seem long on speculation, and short on footnotes (or any explanation of sources). They are too eager to find that a mean, neurotic, unhappy man lay behind his good looks and charm. By contrast, I saw the opportunity to write a truthful, well-balanced and thoroughly documented account of his life, using his personal papers and other archival sources, and through doing this I found a much happier man.

Archie Leach’s birthplace at 8 Hughenden Road, Horfield (later renumbered as number 15)

If you’d had the opportunity to ask Cary Grant a question directly, what would it be?

If I had to choose just one, it would be about the life-changing decision he made at the age of 14. When he left Bristol to join an acrobatic troupe, was he running away from an unhappy home life or running toward show business? That is, did he have a sense of his destiny or was he just so unhappy that he had to escape?

Cary Grant in drag in ‘I Was a Male War Bride’

In contrast to previous biographers, you assert that he was not gay. Why, then, has this myth persisted with multiple partners cited?

Actually, I write that I think he was predominantly heterosexual, but I don’t rule anything out, and I am keen to show that he was very progressive and open-minded about matters of sexuality. He had gay friends from his days in music hall, vaudeville, and on Broadway. He was also the first actor to use the word “gay” to refer to sexual identity on screen. This was in Bringing Up Baby (1938), when he ad-libbed, “I just went gay all of the sudden”, to explain why he is wearing a woman’s frilly robe. There are jokes about his sexuality in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and My Favourite Wife (1940), and he is in drag in I Was a Male War Bride (1949). All of this has prompted speculation about his sexuality, and many gay men – including me – would like to claim him as a gay forefather. But when you look carefully at his life, his overwhelming interest in women is striking. He was married five times, and when he wasn’t married he had a long line of quite serious girlfriends.

Cary Grant with co-star Anna Chang in his first film: the 1931 short ‘Singapore Sue’. He loathed the film and was embarrassed by his awful performance

Despite the traumas of his youth, Cary returned to Bristol on multiple occasions. How would you characterise his relationship with the city?

He loved Bristol and he was very proud to be Bristolian. He returned quite often, always bringing his wives and girlfriends to the city to show it off. While it’s true that his childhood was unhappy in many ways, his stories about growing up in Bristol were full of nostalgia and affection for the place.

Cary Grant was something of a social climber who was eager to escape his humble origins. His mother displayed the same traits. How much was she an influence on his outlook?

She was a big influence, teaching him from a very young age to have perfect manners, while his father taught him to dress carefully. They both gave him the skills and outlook he needed to appear plausible as a suave matinee idol, which was quite an accomplishment for someone who was expelled from school at the age of 14!

Cary enjoys a vigorously heterosexual snog with Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’

How much does Cary’s reputation – merited or otherwise – as an adventurous, acid-dropping bisexual help to explain his continued appeal to young modern audiences, in contrast to that of more starchy leading men of the era?

People are always fascinated to hear about his life. It was full of adventures. But I think his reputation arises primarily from his best films, and the kinds of characters that he played, which have a wry, ironic sensibility that appeals to modern audiences.

Could it also be relevant that his story is also one of reinvention, which chimes with modern identity politics?

Yes, he had a very modern outlook on this. He completely reinvented himself, but unlike other stars of his era, he never hid his origins. John Wayne tried to keep his real name – Marion Morrison – quiet, but Cary Grant often talked about his real background as Archie Leach from Bristol. He knew audiences would like him better for it.

Mae West invites Cary to come up and see her in ‘She Done Him Wrong’. They didn’t get on. He later observed that “she had a flabby belly which always wiggled when she walked”.

Cary could be rather ungallant towards Hollywood women, from Mae West onwards. Why do you think this was?

He resented Mae West because she told people that she had “discovered” him, implying that he owed his career to her, and this was not true. But he got on well with most of the women he worked with. He became lifelong friends with Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Myrna Loy and Rosalind Russell, while others – Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, Samantha Eggar – said that as a performer he was very generous to them on the set.

Which is your Desert Island Cary Grant movie and why?

I’ll choose North by Northwest because it seems like a summation of his entire career, but I would miss The Awful Truth, Holiday, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, Indiscreet and Charade, to name a few favourites among the 72 films that he made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0-euBr_vRU

Critic David Thomson described Cary Grant as “the best and most important actor in the history of cinema”. As a film historian, where do you think he stands in the pantheon?

I think Thomson is right. Through making so many films (25 in his first 5 years in Hollywood), and studying his own performances very carefully, he learned how to act for the camera, and with a degree of precision, subtlety and grace that remains unrivalled today.

For tickets and more information about the talk, panel discussion and Q&A on Monday, visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk/events/cary-grant-the-making-of-a-hollywood-legend

All images supplied by Oxford University Press. Main pic: Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace.

Read more: Cary Grant’s long strange trip