A star among Hollywood stars, Cary Grant's off-screen life bore little resemblance to his on-screen image.
We have not yet reached the first hour of that masterpiece, With Death on His Heels, when Roger O. Thornhill, who has already been mistaken for this George Kaplan and charged with the dead, makes his way through the crowd of the Grand Central station willing to buy his escape in the form of a train ticket.
And since we are in a Hitchcock movie, and in Hitchcock movies, after a problem only comes another problem, the man who attends to Cary Grant and his dark glasses on the other side of the window gives him the worst possible blow to the nose.
"Is something wrong with your eyes?" asks the station worker who issues the tickets with annoyance. And Roger O. Thornbill, who has just seen himself on the front pages of the newspapers, is not up for bullshit. "Yes, they are very sensitive to questions," replies the protagonist before sneaking onto the train on which Eva Marie Saint travels bound for film history. Cary Grant's eyes were just as sensitive in real life, too.
Cary Grant seemed comfortable in all of his outfits. In fact, it's not that he chose them: it was the suits that chose him. Comfortable in all but one: his own life. The one that he hid at the bottom of a closet that he never came out of so as not to see his career harmed. Because Archibald Leach, the name with which the most elegant actor in Hollywood has given was born, married five women (Virginia Cherrill, Barbara Hutton, Betsy Drake, Dyan Cannon, and B, Barbara Harris) and fell deeply in love with others as impressive as Sofia Loren, but he also shared more than just a house with a pool with actor Randolph Scott.
The son of a Jewish tailor and a seamstress mother, Archibald Alec Leach was born in Bristol, United Kingdom, in 1904. His childhood was not an easy one. He did not meet his older brother because the little one died of meningitis before he was born. And his father was a drinker, and when Archie was still a boy, he told her that his mother had left home for a long vacation. So long that Archie thought for many years, even when he was Cary Grant, that his mother had died. It wasn't like that.
The woman, who suffered from a mental illness, remained admitted to a psychiatric hospital and his father took the opportunity to marry another woman when Archie was barely 10 years old. Before traveling to New York, Archibald learned to be an acrobat. And, once there, he acted as such and as a singer in small theaters, some traveling.
In 1932 he made his film debut. In that year alone, he has already worked on seven feature films and one short. And he fell into grace, worth the expression, in which he had not fallen in his childhood: The idol of New York, The puritanical rogue, The beast of my girl, Only angels have wings, New moon, My favorite woman, Stories from Philadelphia, Nostalgic Serenade.
And then Suspicion, with Hitchcock filling the glass of milk that Cary Grant carries up the stairs to Joan Fontaine's room with suspense and light. And Chained, with Ingrid Bergman and the scene in the cellar. And, after a few more movies, he To Catch a Thief with Grace Kelly. And You and I, with Deborah Kerr.
And Pride and Passion, with Sofía Loren, with whom he fell in love during the filming in Ávila. And again Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreet. Y With death on the heels before entering the last seasons of his brilliant career: Charade, along with Audrey Hepburn; Operation Whiskey; and Apartment for Three (1966), with Cary Grant in an undershirt and underpants through the streets of Tokyo at the Olympic Games.
He was still 62 years old, but Cary Grant decided to retire early. "I am tired of the cinema and the cinema is tired of me," he argued. Some time ago he had already started experimenting with LSD as therapy and repeated it frequently until he gave it up in his late 70s. Cary Grant, who in the cinema barely managed to dirty the plane that goes directly to him in With Death on his heels, dragged that stain off the screens, but also another: the accusations of his supposedly possessive treatment of several of their women.
The Hollywood Academy, which nominated Cary Grant twice without an award (for Nostalgic Serenade and A Heart in Danger), awarded him the Honorary Oscar in 1970. Frank Sinatra presented it to him before a star-studded audience that broke into applause As soon as a lone figure appeared on the stage, already with gray hair, who wore the same smile and gave off the same charm as always.
Archibald Leach died of a heart attack in Iowa in 1986 at the age of 82. Cary Grant, on the other hand, as long as his movies can be seen, will never die.
