Cary Grant

Early life and education

Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach on 18 January 1904 at 15 Hughenden Road in Horfield, a suburb of Bristol in England. He was the second child of Elias James Leach and Elsie Maria Leach (née Kingdon). His father worked as a tailor's presser at a clothes factory, while his mother worked as a seamstress. His older brother John William Elias Leach died of tuberculous meningitis two days before his first birthday. Grant may have considered himself partly Jewish but was raised Anglican from his mother's background. He had an unhappy upbringing; his father was an alcoholic and his mother had clinical depression.

Grant's mother taught him song and dance when he was four, and she was keen on him having piano lessons. She occasionally took him to the cinema, where he enjoyed the performances of Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, and Broncho Billy Anderson. His family moved a short distance to 50 Berkeley Road at about age 4, and he was sent to Bishop Road Primary School when he was 4+1⁄2. He lived at six addresses in Bristol, but said his time at Berkeley Road was where he spent his childhood's "happiest days".

Grant's biographer Graham McCann claimed that his mother "did not know how to give affection and did not know how to receive it either". Biographer Geoffrey Wansell notes that his mother blamed herself bitterly for the death of Grant's brother John, and never recovered from it. Grant acknowledged that his negative experiences with his mother affected his relationships with women later in life. She frowned on alcohol and tobacco, and reduced his pocket money for minor mishaps. Grant attributed her behavior to overprotectiveness, fearing that she would lose him as she did John.

When Grant was nine, his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital, a mental institution, and told him she had gone away on a "long holiday", later declaring that she had died. Grant grew up resenting his mother, particularly after being told she left the family. After she was institutionalised, Grant and his father moved into Grant's grandmother's home in Bristol. When Grant was ten, his father remarried and started a new family. Grant did not learn that his mother was still alive until he was 31, his father confessing to the lie shortly before his own death. Grant made arrangements for his mother to leave the institution in June 1935, shortly after he learned of her whereabouts. He visited her regularly, including after filming Gunga Din in October 1938.

Vaudeville and performing career

The Pender Troupe began touring the country, and Grant's performing pantomime developed his physical skills, broadening the range of his acting. The troupe traveled on the RMS Olympic to conduct a tour of the United States on 21 July 1920, when he was 16, arriving a week later. Biographer Richard Schickel writes that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were aboard the same ship, returning from their honeymoon; Grant played shuffleboard with Fairbanks, who became an important role model for him. After arriving in New York, the group performed at the New York Hippodrome, the largest theater in the world at the time with a capacity of 5,697. They performed there for nine months, putting on 12 shows a week, and they had a successful production of Good Times.

Grant became a part of the vaudeville circuit and began touring, performing in places such as St. Louis, Missouri, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, and he decided to stay in the US with several of the other members when the rest of the troupe returned to Britain. He became fond of the Marx Brothers during this period, and Zeppo Marx was an early role model for him. In July 1922, he performed in a group called the "Knockabout Comedians" at the Palace Theater on Broadway. He formed another group that summer called "The Walking Stanleys" with several of the former members of the Pender Troupe, and he starred in a variety show named "Better Times" at the Hippodrome towards the end of the year. While serving as a paid escort for the opera singer Lucrezia Bori at a Park Avenue party, he met George C. Tilyou Jr., whose family owned Steeplechase Park. Learning of his acrobatic experience, Tilyou hired him to work as a stilt-walker and attract large crowds on the newly opened Coney Island Boardwalk, wearing a bright greatcoat and a sandwich board that advertised the amusement park.

Grant spent the next couple of years touring the United States with "The Walking Stanleys". He visited Los Angeles for the first time in 1924, which made a lasting impression on him. The group split up and he returned to New York, where he began performing at the National Vaudeville Artists Club on West 46th Street, doing comic sketches, juggling, performing acrobatics, and as "Rubber Legs", riding a unicycle. The experience was a particularly demanding one, but it gave Grant the opportunity to improve his comic technique and to develop skills that benefitted him later in Hollywood.

Grant became a leading man alongside Jean Dalrymple and decided to form the "Jack Janis Company", which began touring vaudeville. He was sometimes mistaken for an Australian during this period and was nicknamed "Kangaroo" or "Boomerang". His accent seemed to have changed as a result of moving to London with the Pender troupe and working in so many music halls in the UK and the US, eventually developing a sort of transatlantic or mid-Atlantic accent. In 1927, he was cast as an Australian in Reggie Hammerstein's musical Golden Dawn, for which he earned $75 a week. The show was not well received, but it lasted for 184 performances and several critics started to notice Grant as the "pleasant new juvenile" or "competent young newcomer".

Film career

1932–1936: Debut and early roles

Grant's role in Nikki was praised by Ed Sullivan of The New York Daily News, who noted that the "young lad from England" had "a big future in the movies". The review led to another screen test by Paramount Publix, resulting in an appearance as a sailor in Singapore Sue (1931), a ten-minute short film by Casey Robinson. Grant delivered his lines "without any conviction" according to McCann. Through Robinson, Grant met with Jesse L. Lasky and B. P. Schulberg, the co-founder and general manager of Paramount Pictures, respectively. After a successful screen-test directed by Marion Gering, Schulberg signed a contract with the 27-year-old Grant on 7 December 1931, for five years, at a starting salary of $450 a week. Schulberg demanded that he change his name to "something that sounded more all-American like Gary Cooper", and they eventually agreed on Cary Grant.

Grant set out to establish himself as what McCann calls the "epitome of masculine glamour", and made Douglas Fairbanks his first role model. McCann notes that Grant's career in Hollywood immediately took off because he exhibited a "genuine charm", which made him stand out among the other good looking actors at the time, making it "remarkably easy to find people who were willing to support his embryonic career". He made his feature film debut with the Frank Tuttle-directed comedy This is the Night (1932), playing an Olympic javelin thrower opposite Thelma Todd and Lili Damita. Grant disliked his role and threatened to leave Hollywood, but to his surprise a critic from Variety praised his performance, and thought that he looked like a "potential femme rave".

In 1932, Grant played a wealthy playboy opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Grant's role is described by William Rothman as projecting the "distinctive kind of nonmacho masculinity that was to enable him to incarnate a man capable of being a romantic hero". Grant found that he conflicted with the director during the filming and the two often argued in German. He played a suave playboy type in a number of films: Merrily We Go to Hell opposite Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney, Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton (Cooper and Grant had no scenes together), Hot Saturday opposite Nancy Carroll and Randolph Scott, and Madame Butterfly with Sidney. According to biographer Marc Eliot, while these films did not make Grant a star, they did well enough to establish him as one of Hollywood's "new crop of fast-rising actors".

1937–1945: Hollywood stardom

In 1937, Grant began the first film under his contract with Columbia Pictures, When You're in Love, portraying a wealthy American artist who eventually woos a famous opera singer (Grace Moore). His performance received positive feedback from critics, with Mae Tinee of The Chicago Daily Tribune describing it as the "best thing he's done in a long time". After a commercial failure in his second RKO venture The Toast of New York, Grant was loaned to Hal Roach's studio for Topper, a screwball comedy film distributed by MGM, which became his first major comedy success. Grant played one half of a wealthy, freewheeling married couple with Constance Bennett, who wreak havoc on the world as ghosts after dying in a car accident. Topper became one of the most popular movies of the year, with a critic from Variety noting that both Grant and Bennett "do their assignments with great skill". Vermilye described the film's success as "a logical springboard" for Grant to star in The Awful Truth that year, his first film made with Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy. Though director Leo McCarey reportedly disliked Grant, who had mocked the director by enacting his mannerisms in the film, he recognized Grant's comic talents and encouraged him to improvise his lines and draw upon his skills developed in vaudeville. The film was a critical and commercial success and made Grant a top Hollywood star, establishing a screen persona for him as a sophisticated light comedy leading man in screwball comedies.

The Awful Truth began what film critic Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic later called "the most spectacular run ever for an actor in American pictures" for Grant. In 1938, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, featuring a leopard and frequent bickering and verbal jousting between Grant and Hepburn. He was initially uncertain how to play his character, but was told by director Howard Hawks to think of Harold Lloyd. Grant was given more leeway in the comic scenes, the editing of the film and in educating Hepburn in the art of comedy. Despite losing over $350,000 for RKO, the film earned rave reviews from critics. He again appeared with Hepburn in the romantic comedy Holiday later that year, which did not fare well commercially, to the point that Hepburn was considered to be "box office poison" at the time.

Despite a series of commercial failures, Grant was now more popular than ever and in high demand. According to Vermilye, in 1939, Grant played roles that were more dramatic, albeit with comical undertones. He played a British army sergeant opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the George Stevens-directed adventure film Gunga Din, set at a military station in India. Roles as a pilot opposite Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, and a wealthy landowner alongside Carole Lombard in In Name Only followed.

1946–1953: Post-War success and slump

After making a brief cameo appearance opposite Claudette Colbert in Without Reservations (1946), Grant portrayed Cole Porter in the musical Night and Day (1946). The production proved to be problematic, with scenes often requiring multiple takes, frustrating the cast and crew. Grant next appeared with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in the Hitchcock-directed film Notorious (1946), playing a government agent who recruits the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy (Bergman) to infiltrate a Nazi organization in Brazil after World War II. During the course of the film Grant and Bergman's characters fall in love and share one of the longest kisses in film history at around two and a half minutes. Wansell notes how Grant's performance "underlined how far his unique qualities as a screen actor had matured in the years since The Awful Truth".

In 1947, Grant played an artist who becomes involved in a court case when charged with assault in the comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (released in the U.K. as "Bachelor Knight"), opposite Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple. The film was praised by the critics, who admired the picture's slapstick qualities and chemistry between Grant and Loy; it became one of the biggest-selling films at the box office that year. Later that year he starred opposite David Niven and Loretta Young in the comedy The Bishop's Wife, playing an angel who is sent down from heaven to straighten out the relationship between the bishop (Niven) and his wife (Loretta Young). The film was a major commercial and critical success, and was nominated for five Academy Awards. Life magazine called it "intelligently written and competently acted".

The following year, Grant played neurotic Jim Blandings, the title-sake in the comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, again with Loy. Though the film lost money for RKO, Philip T. Hartung of Commonweal thought that Grant's role as the "frustrated advertising man" was one of his best screen portrayals. In Every Girl Should Be Married, an "airy comedy", he appeared with Betsy Drake and Franchot Tone, playing a bachelor who is trapped into marriage by Drake's conniving character. He finished the year as the fourth most popular film star at the box office. In 1949, Grant starred alongside Ann Sheridan in the comedy I Was a Male War Bride in which he appeared in scenes dressed as a woman, wearing a skirt and a wig. During the filming he was taken ill with infectious hepatitis and lost weight, affecting the way he looked in the picture. The film, based on the autobiography of Belgian resistance fighter Roger Charlier, proved to be successful, becoming the highest-grossing film for 20th Century Fox that year with over $4.5 million in takings and being likened to Hawks's screwball comedies of the late 1930s. By this point he was one of the highest paid Hollywood stars, commanding $300,000 per picture.

1955–1966: Film resurgence and final roles

In 1955, Grant agreed to star opposite Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, playing a retired jewel thief named John Robie, nicknamed "The Cat", living in the French Riviera. Grant and Kelly worked well together during the production, which was one of the most enjoyable experiences of Grant's career. He found Hitchcock and Kelly to be very professional, and later stated that Kelly was "possibly the finest actress I've ever worked with". Grant was one of the first actors to go independent by not renewing his studio contract, effectively leaving the studio system, which almost completely controlled all aspects of an actor's life. He decided which films he was going to appear in, often had personal choice of directors and co-stars, and at times negotiated a share of the gross revenue, something uncommon at the time. Grant received more than $700,000 for his 10% of the gross of the successful To Catch a Thief, while Hitchcock received less than $50,000 for directing and producing it. Though critical reception to the overall film was mixed, Grant received high praise for his performance, with critics commenting on his suave, handsome appearance in the film.

In 1957, Grant starred opposite Deborah Kerr in the romance An Affair to Remember, playing an international playboy who becomes the object of her affections. Schickel sees the film as one of the definitive romantic pictures of the period, but remarks that Grant was not entirely successful in trying to supersede the film's "gushing sentimentality". That year, Grant also appeared opposite Sophia Loren in The Pride and the Passion. He had expressed an interest in playing William Holden's character in The Bridge on the River Kwai at the time, but found that it was not possible because of his commitment to The Pride and the Passion. The film was shot on location in Spain and was problematic, with co-star Frank Sinatra irritating his colleagues and leaving the production after just a few weeks. Although Grant had an affair with Loren during filming, Grant's attempts to woo Loren to marry him during the production proved fruitless, which led to him expressing anger when Paramount cast her opposite him in Houseboat (1958) as part of her contract. The sexual tension between the two was so great during the making of Houseboat that the producers found it almost impossible to make. Later in 1958, Grant starred opposite Bergman in the romantic comedy Indiscreet, playing a successful financier who has an affair with a famous actress (Bergman) while pretending to be a married man. During the filming he formed a closer friendship and gained new respect for her as an actress. Schickel stated that he thought the film was possibly the finest romantic comedy film of the era, and that Grant himself had professed that it was one of his personal favorites. Grant received his first of five Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy nominations for his performance and finished the year as the most popular film star at the box office.

Later years

In 1966, when his daughter Jennifer Grant was born, Grant retired from the screen so he could focus on bringing her up and to provide a sense of permanence and stability in her life. He had become increasingly disillusioned with cinema in the 1960s, rarely finding a script of which he approved. He remarked: "I could have gone on acting and playing a grandfather or a bum, but I discovered more important things in life". He knew after he had made Charade that the "Golden Age" of Hollywood was over. Grant expressed little interest in making a career comeback, and would respond to the suggestion with "fat chance". He did, however, briefly appear in the audience for Elvis Presley's 1970 Las Vegas concert documentary Elvis: That's the Way It Is. In the 1970s, he was given the negatives from a number of his films, and he sold them to television for a sum of over $2 million in 1975 ($12 million in 2025).

Morecambe and Stirling argue that Grant's absence from film after 1966 was not because he had "irrevocably turned his back on the film industry," but because he was "caught between a decision made and the temptation to eat a bit of humble pie and re-announce himself to the cinema-going public". In the 1970s, MGM was keen on remaking Grand Hotel (1932) and hoped to lure Grant out of retirement. Hitchcock had long wanted to make a film based on the idea of Hamlet, with Grant in the lead role. Grant stated that Warren Beatty had made a big effort to get him to play the role of Mr. Jordan in Heaven Can Wait (1978), which eventually went to James Mason. Morecambe and Stirling claim that Grant had also expressed an interest in appearing in A Touch of Class (1973), The Verdict (1982), and a film adaptation of William Goldman's 1983 book about screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, Grant became troubled by the deaths of many close friends, including Howard Hughes in 1976, Howard Hawks in 1977, Lord Mountbatten and Barbara Hutton in 1979, Alfred Hitchcock in 1980, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman in 1982, and David Niven in 1983. At the funeral of Mountbatten, he was quoted as remarking to a friend: "I'm absolutely pooped, and I'm so goddamned old. ...I'm going to quit all next year. I'm going to lie in bed... I shall just close all doors, turn off the telephone, and enjoy my life". Grace Kelly's death was the hardest on him, as it was unexpected and the two had remained close friends after filming To Catch a Thief. Grant visited Monaco three or four times each year during his retirement, and showed his support for Kelly by joining the board of the Princess Grace Foundation.

Critical reception and commentary

Film critic Pauline Kael, a fan of Grant's, once described him as "the most publicly seduced male the world has ever known." Of his persona, Kael wrote: "The little bit of shyness and reserve in Grant is pure box-office gold, and being the pursued doesn't make him seem weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous, and since he's not available as other men, far more desirable."

Business interests

Stirling refers to Grant as "one of the shrewdest businessmen ever to operate in Hollywood". His long-term friendship with Howard Hughes from the 1930s onward saw him invited into the most glamorous circles in Hollywood and their lavish parties. Biographers Morecambe and Stirling state that Hughes played a major role in the development of Grant's business interests so that by 1939, he was "already an astute operator with various commercial interests". Scott also played a role, encouraging Grant to invest his money in shares, making him a wealthy man by the end of the 1930s. In the 1940s, Grant and Barbara Hutton invested heavily in real estate development in Acapulco at a time when it was little more than a fishing village, and teamed up with Richard Widmark, Roy Rogers, and Red Skelton to buy a hotel there. Behind his business interests was a particularly intelligent mind, to the point that his friend David Niven once said: "Before computers went into general release, Cary had one in his brain". Film critic David Thomson believes that Grant's intelligence came across on screen, and stated that "no one else looked so good and so intelligent at the same time".

After Grant retired from the screen, he became more active in business. He accepted a position on the board of directors at Fabergé. This position was not honorary, as some had assumed; Grant regularly attended meetings and traveled internationally to support them. His pay was modest in comparison to the millions of his film career, a salary of a reported $15,000 a year. Such was Grant's influence on the company that George Barrie once claimed that Grant had played a role in the growth of the firm to annual revenues of about $50 million in 1968, a growth of nearly 80% since the inaugural year in 1964. The position also permitted the use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother, Dyan Cannon, was working.

In 1975, Grant was an appointed director of MGM. In 1980, he sat on the board of MGM Films and MGM Grand Hotels following the division of the parent company. He played an active role in the promotion of MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas when it opened in 1973, and he continued to promote the city throughout the 1970s. When Allan Warren met Grant for a photo shoot that year he noticed how tired Grant looked, and his "slightly melancholic air". Grant later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle, Hollywood, California), and Western Airlines (acquired by Delta Air Lines in 1987).

Personal life

Grant became a naturalized United States citizen on 26 June 1942, aged 38, at which time he also legally changed his name to Cary Grant. At the time of his naturalization, he listed his middle name as Alexander rather than Alec.

One of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood, Grant owned houses in Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Palm Springs. He was immaculate in his personal grooming, and Edith Head, the renowned Hollywood costume designer, appreciated his "meticulous" attention to detail and considered him to have had the greatest fashion sense of any actor she had worked with. McCann attributed his "almost obsessive maintenance" with tanning, which deepened the older he got, to Douglas Fairbanks, who also had a major influence on his refined sense of dress. McCann notes that because Grant came from a working-class background and was not well educated, he made a particular effort over the course of his career to mix with high society and absorb their knowledge, manners, and etiquette. His image was meticulously crafted from the early days in Hollywood, where he frequently sunbathed; he avoided being photographed smoking despite smoking two packs a day at the time. Grant quit smoking in the early 1950s through hypnotherapy. He remained health-conscious, staying very trim and athletic even into his late career, though he claimed that he "never crook[ed] a finger to keep fit", saying that he did "everything in moderation. Except making love."

Grant's daughter, Jennifer, said that her father made hundreds of friends from all walks of life, and that their house was frequently visited by the likes of Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Quincy Jones, Gregory Peck and his wife Veronique, Johnny Carson and his wife, Kirk Kerkorian, and Merv Griffin. She said that Grant and Sinatra were the closest of friends, that the two men had a similar radiance and "indefinable incandescence of charm", and that they were eternally "high on life". Grant became a fan of comedians Morecambe and Wise in the 1960s, and remained friends with Eric Morecambe until his death in 1984.

While raising Jennifer, Grant archived artifacts of her childhood and adolescence in a bank-quality, room-sized vault he had installed in the house. Jennifer attributed this meticulous collection to the fact that artifacts of his own childhood had been destroyed during the Luftwaffe's bombing of Bristol in World War II (an event that also claimed the lives of his uncle, aunt, cousin, and his cousin's husband and grandson), and he may have wanted to prevent her from experiencing a similar loss.

Marriages

Grant was married five times. He wed Virginia Cherrill on 9 February 1934, at the Caxton Hall register office in London. She divorced him on 26 March 1935, following charges that he had hit her. They were involved in a bitter divorce case which was widely reported in the press, with Cherrill demanding $1,000 a week from him in benefits from his Paramount earnings. Grant then dated actress Phyllis Brooks from 1937. They considered marriage and vacationed together in Europe in mid-1939, visiting the Roman villa of Dorothy Taylor Dentice di Frasso in Italy, but the relationship ended later that year.

He married Barbara Hutton in 1942, one of the wealthiest women in the world, following a $50 million inheritance from her grandfather Frank Winfield Woolworth. They were derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary", although Grant refused any financial settlement in a prenuptial agreement to avoid the accusation that he married for money. Toward the end of their marriage they lived in a white mansion at 10615 Bellagio Road in Bel Air. They divorced in 1945, although they remained the "fondest of friends". He dated Betty Hensel for a period, then married Betsy Drake, the co-star of two of his films, on 25 December 1949. In 1957 Grant had an affair with Sophia Loren. Drake and Grant separated in 1958, divorcing on 14 August 1962. It was his longest marriage.

Grant married Dyan Cannon on 22 July 1965, at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and their daughter Jennifer, his only child, was born on 26 February 1966; he frequently called her his "best production". He said of fatherhood:

My life changed the day Jennifer was born. I've come to think that the reason we're put on this earth is to procreate. To leave something behind. Not films, because you know that I don't think my films will last very long once I'm gone. But another human being. That's what's important.

Grant and Cannon separated in August 1967. Grant was emotionally abusive towards Cannon.

On 12 March 1968, Grant was involved in a car accident in Queens, New York, en route to JFK Airport, when a truck hit the side of his limousine. He was hospitalized for 17 days with three broken ribs and bruising. A female companion, Baroness Gratia von Furstenberg, was also injured in the accident. Grant and Cannon divorced nine days later.

Politics

Biographer Nancy Nelson noted that Grant did not openly align himself with political causes but occasionally commented on current events. Grant spoke out against the blacklisting of his friend Charlie Chaplin during the period of McCarthyism, arguing that Chaplin was not a communist and that his status as an entertainer was more important than his political beliefs. In 1950, he told a reporter that he would like to see a female president of the United States but asserted a reluctance to comment on political affairs, believing it was not the place of actors to do so. Grant supported Thomas Dewey in the 1944 United States presidential election, appearing at a rally at the Los Angeles Coliseum after the New York governor won the Republican nomination.

In 1963, Grant visited Washington, D.C., and joined Attorney General Robert Kennedy on a visit to a schoolyard and a nearby junkyard, as the two considered how transforming the space into a playground might benefit the city's children.

On 10 December 1967, Grant attended the Democratic National Committee Fundraising Dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

In 1976, Grant made a public appearance at the Republican Party National Convention in Kansas City during which he gave a speech in support of Gerald Ford's reelection and for female equality before introducing Betty Ford onto the stage. A 1977 interview with Grant in The New York Times noted his political beliefs to be conservative but observed that Grant did not actively campaign for candidates.

Death

Grant was at the Adler Theater in Davenport, Iowa, on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 November 1986, preparing for his performance in A Conversation with Cary Grant when he was taken ill; he had been feeling unwell as he arrived at the theater. Basil Williams photographed him there and thought that he still looked his usual suave self, but he noticed that he seemed very tired and that he stumbled once in the auditorium. Williams recalls that Grant rehearsed for half an hour before "something seemed wrong" all of a sudden, and he disappeared backstage. Grant was taken back to the Blackhawk Hotel where he and his wife had checked in, and a doctor was called and discovered that Grant was having a massive stroke, with a blood pressure reading of 210 over 130. Grant refused to be taken to the hospital. The doctor recalled: "The stroke was getting worse. In only fifteen minutes he deteriorated rapidly. It was terrible watching him die and not being able to help. But he wouldn't let us." By 8:45 p.m., Grant had slipped into a coma and was taken to St. Luke's Hospital in Davenport, Iowa. He spent 45 minutes in the emergency room before being transferred to intensive care. He died at 11:22 pm, aged 82.

An editorial in The New York Times stated: "Cary Grant was not supposed to die. ... Cary Grant was supposed to stick around, our perpetual touchstone of charm and elegance and romance and youth." His body was taken back to California, where it was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. No funeral was conducted for him following his request, which Roderick Mann remarked was appropriate for "the private man who didn't want the nonsense of a funeral". His estate was worth in the region of sixty to eighty million dollars; the bulk of it went to Barbara Harris and Jennifer.

Screen persona

McCann wrote that one of the reasons why Grant's film career was so successful is that he was not conscious of how handsome he was on screen, acting in a fashion that was most unexpected and unusual from a Hollywood star of that period. George Cukor once stated: "You see, he didn't depend on his looks. He wasn't a narcissist, he acted as though he were just an ordinary young man. And that made it all the more appealing, that a handsome young man was funny; that was especially unexpected and good because we think, 'Well, if he's a Beau Brummel, he can't be either funny or intelligent', but he proved otherwise". Jennifer Grant acknowledged that her father neither relied on his looks nor was a character actor, and said that he was just the opposite of that, playing the "basic man".

Grant's appeal was unusually broad among both men and women. Pauline Kael remarked that men wanted to be him and women dreamed of dating him. She noticed that Grant treated his female co-stars differently than many of the leading men at the time, regarding them as subjects with multiple qualities rather than "treating them as sex objects". Leslie Caron said that he was the most talented leading man she worked with. David Shipman writes that "more than most stars, he belonged to the public". A number of critics have argued that Grant had the rare star ability to turn a mediocre picture into a good one. Philip T. Hartung of The Commonweal stated in his review for Mr. Lucky (1943) that, if it "weren't for Cary Grant's persuasive personality, the whole thing would melt away to nothing at all". Political theorist C. L. R. James saw Grant as a "new and very important symbol", a new type of Englishman who differed from Leslie Howard and Ronald Colman, who represented the "freedom, natural grace, simplicity, and directness which characterise such different American types as Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan", which ultimately symbolized the growing relationship between Britain and America.

McCann notes that Grant typically played "wealthy privileged characters who never seemed to have any need to work in order to maintain their glamorous and hedonistic lifestyle". Martin Stirling thought that Grant had an acting range that was "greater than any of his contemporaries", but felt that a number of critics underrated him as an actor. He believes that Grant was always at his "physical and verbal best in situations that bordered on farce". Charles Champlin identifies a paradox in Grant's screen persona, in his unusual ability to "mix polish and pratfalls in successive scenes". He remarks that Grant was "refreshingly able to play the near-fool, the fey idiot, without compromising his masculinity or surrendering to camp for its own sake". Wansell further notes that Grant could, "with the arch of an eyebrow or the merest hint of a smile, question his own image". Stanley Donen stated that his real "magic" came from his attention to minute details and always seeming real, which came from "enormous amounts of work" rather than being God-given. Grant remarked of his career: "I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person, or he became me". He professed that the real Cary Grant was more like his scruffy, unshaven fisherman in Father Goose than the "well-tailored charmer" of Charade.

Honors and awards

Biographers Morecambe and Stirling believe that Cary Grant was the "greatest leading man Hollywood had ever known". Schickel stated that there are "very few stars who achieve the magnitude of Cary Grant, art of a very high and subtle order" and thought that he was the "best star actor there ever was in the movies". David Thomson and directors Stanley Donen and Howard Hawks concurred that Grant was the greatest and most important actor in the history of the cinema. He was a favorite of Hitchcock's, who admired him and called him "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". He remained one of Hollywood's top box-office attractions for almost 30 years. Pauline Kael stated that the world still thinks of him affectionately because he "embodies what seems a happier time−a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer".

Grant was nominated for Academy Awards for Penny Serenade (1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), but he never won a competitive Oscar. He did, however, receive a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970. The inscription on his statuette read "To Cary Grant, for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with respect and affection of his colleagues". Presenting the award to Grant, Frank Sinatra announced: "No one has brought more pleasure to more people for so many years than Cary has, and nobody has done so many things so well".

Grant was awarded a special plaque at the Straw Hat Awards in New York in May 1975, which recognized him as a "star and superstar in entertainment". In July 1976, Betty Ford invited him to attend the Bicentennial dinner for Queen Elizabeth II at the White House and to give a speech introducing her at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City the following month. He was invited to a royal charity gala in 1978 at the London Palladium. In 1979, he hosted the American Film Institute's tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, and presented Laurence Olivier with his honorary Oscar.

In 1981, Grant was accorded the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1984, a theater on the MGM lot was renamed the "Cary Grant Theatre". In 1995, more than 100 leading film directors were asked to reveal their favorite actor of all time in a Time Out poll, and Grant came second only to Marlon Brando. In December 2001, a statue of Grant by Graham Ibbeson was unveiled in Millennium Square, a regenerated area next to Bristol Harbour, Bristol, the city where he was born. In November 2005, Grant again came first in Premiere magazine's list of "The 50 Greatest Movie Stars of All Time". The biennial Cary Comes Home Festival was established in 2014 in his hometown Bristol. McCann declared that Grant was "quite simply, the funniest actor cinema has ever produced".

Portrayals

Grant was portrayed by John Gavin in the 1980 made-for-television biographical film Sophia Loren: Her Own Story, and in the similar 1987 TV serialisation Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, James Read played Grant as Barbara Hutton's third husband.

The British miniseries Archie, covering Grant's life, was broadcast from November 2023 on ITV. Grant is portrayed by Dainton Anderson, Oaklee Pendergast, Calam Lynch and Jason Isaacs at successive stages of his life.

Filmography and stage work

From 1932 to 1966, Grant starred in over seventy films. In 1999, the American Film Institute named him the second-greatest male star of Golden Age Hollywood cinema (after Humphrey Bogart). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Penny Serenade (1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944).

Widely recognized for comedic and dramatic roles, among his best-known films are:

Blonde Venus (1932) with Marlene Dietrich

She Done Him Wrong (1933) with Mae West

Sylvia Scarlett (1935) with Katharine Hepburn

The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne

Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Katharine Hepburn

Holiday (1938) with Katharine Hepburn

Gunga Din (1939) with Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) with Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth

His Girl Friday (1940) with Rosalind Russell

My Favorite Wife (1940) with Irene Dunne

The Philadelphia Story (1940) with Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart

Suspicion (1941) with Joan Fontaine

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) with Priscilla Lane and Peter Lorre

Notorious (1946) with Ingrid Bergman