Celebrity Biographies
Cary Grant
Alfred Hitchcock said that if he tied a star to the train track in a movie, the audience would shake in their seats. But if he tied up Cary Grant, the audience would be on their feet and trying to get onto the screen so they could do something.
These phrases summarize that Cary Grant is one of the stars that falls the best, and with which the viewer has most identified in the cinema. January 18, 2004 marked the centenary of this comedy legend, who also starred in unforgettable thrillers and various adventure film classics.
An interviewer once told him that everyone wants to be like Cary Grant, to which he replied, “Me too.” Time has passed, but this actor is still one of the most popular stars. Archibald Alec Leach was born in England, specifically in Bristol, the only child of a middle-class family. A tragic event marked his childhood, the fact that his mother was confined in a mental hospital. He dropped out of school at the age of 14 to join a troupe of tumblers, where he learns stilt walking and the art of pantomime. Eight of the company’s members moved to the United States to put on a highly successful Broadway show. One of the great divas of the 30s, Mae West, notice him because he combined “virility with a gentleman’s aura”. He signed her up to star with her in a play, which Mae West herself had written, Lady Lou , later made into a film.
Paramount executives sign him, and Grant makes his supporting debut at age 28 in Tonight . When his contract with this production company ran out, Grant made an unusual decision, becoming a freelance at a time when all actors were on the payroll at one of the studios. Titles such as Silvia’s Great Adventure , My Girl’s Beast and Gunga Din from RKO or Only Angels Have Wings , and New Moon , from Columbia are at the top of the collection lists, so all the producers were anxious to hire the actor.
Hitchcock was heavily criticized for listing Grant as a suspected murderer, on Suspicion , because the public figured from minute one that Grant was incapable of killing a fly. To remedy the mistake, the master of suspense cast the actor in three more of his best films: Notorious , To Catch a Thief and Close in on Death . A Philadelphia Story and Pity Arsenic are two of the best comedies in movie history, while Me and You is the epitome of romantic comedy. In addition, the actor had time to demonstrate his ability for drama, in Nostalgic Serenade , or Night and Day, where he played the musician Cole Porter .
In the 1960s, the actor already felt a little too old for the leading man roles he was offered, and he even turned down several times to work with Audrey Hepburn , due to the 25-year age difference, in Roman Holidays and Sabrina . Finally she did, in the unforgettable Charade , but she demanded that they change the script so that she was the one who fell in love with him, and not the other way around, and so that they put some gagsin which he mocked her age. Retired from the cinema in 1966, because he realized that sophisticated comedy had gone out of style, four years later he was awarded an honorary Oscar, because paradoxically he had not been given one until then. While representing a comic monologue in Iowa, on December 28, 1986, he suffered a heart attack, which hours later would cause his death.