Cary Grant His Long Road to Fame

IT TOOK A LOT OF DETERMINATION FOR A POOR BOY FROM BRISTOL TO BECOME THE KING OF HOLLYWOOD

- LOUISE A. BARILE

He played many of the silver screen’s most suave, cultured men, but Cary Grant enjoyed poking fun at his image. “Sometimes I would come home from shopping and he’d meet me in a top hat and his pajamas and he’d do a funny walk,” his widow, Barbara Jaynes, tells Closer. “He was even funnier than he was in films.”

With a movie career that spanned three decades and many genres, Cary became Hollywood’s definition of a leading man. His handsome looks, sophisticated aura and continental accent were even said to be a model for superspy James Bond. “Everyone would like to be Cary Grant,” an interviewer once told him. The famous actor cheekily replied: “So would I!” In fact, the road that would take him from his birth as Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, to Cary Grant, movie star, would be a long one. “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each,” he admitted in his memoir.