Star among Hollywood stars, his life off the screen bore little resemblance to his image on film.
We have not yet reached the first hour of that masterpiece that is Death on His Heels when Roger O. Thornhill, who has already been mistaken for this George Kaplan and has been charged with the dead, makes his way through the crowd of the Grand Central station ready 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 serves Cary Grant and his dark glasses on the other side of the window finds himself touching the nose at the worst moment.
«Is there something wrong with your eyes?, asks the station worker who dispenses the tickets angrily. And Roger O. Thornbill, who has just found himself on the front pages of the newspapers, is not up to any nonsense. "Yes, they are very sensitive to questions," responds the protagonist before sneaking onto the train in which Eva Marie Saint is traveling towards cinema history. Cary Grant's eyes also showed that same sensitivity in real life.
Cary Grant looked comfortable in all of his suits. In fact, it's not that he chose them: it was the suits that chose him. Comfortable in all, except one: his own life. The one he hid at the back 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 Hollywood has ever produced, married five women (Virginia Cherrill, Barbara Hutton, Betsy Drake, Dyan Cannon and Barbara Harris) and fell deeply in love with others as impressive as Sofia. Loren, but she 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 came into the world in Bristol, United Kingdom, in 1904. His childhood was not easy. He did not know 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 child, he told her that his mother had left home to enjoy a long vacation. So long that Archie thought for many years, even when he was already 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 performed as such and as a singer in small theaters, some traveling. In 1932 he made his film debut. In that year alone he already worked on seven feature films and one short. And he fell into grace, pardon the expression, into which he had not fallen in his childhood: The Idol of New York, The Puritan Rogue, My Girl's Beast, 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 cellar scene. And, after a few more movies, he Catches 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 filming in Ávila. And again Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreta. And With Death on his heels before entering the last seasons of his brilliant career: Charade, alongside Audrey Hepburn; Operation Whiskey; and Apartment for Three (1966), with Cary Grant in an undershirt and boxers through the streets of Tokyo at the Olympic Games.
He was still 62 years old, but Cary Grant decided to retire early. "I'm tired of cinema and 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 stopped when he was almost 70 years old. Cary Grant, who in the cinema barely managed to dirty the plane that is heading straight for 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 gave it to him before a star-studded audience that burst into applause in When a long figure appeared on stage, already with gray hair, who wore the same smile and gave off the same charm as always.
