Cary Grant and Randolph Scott are “Batching It” in the fan magazine Modern Screen (September 1937).
… I suppose what I want people to take away is that we can create ourselves. When the troupe went on a US tour, he accompanied them with £50 in his pocket.
Cary Grant, real name Archibald Leach (pictured age five) was born in 1904 in a working-class Bristol suburb to a feckless, alcoholic father and a mentally unstable mother
In New York, he supplemented his meagre income selling ties out of a suitcase on Broadway and wouldn’t return to Britain until 1929, aged 25.
Grant, who never had formal acting training but was a skilled mimic of other performers, eventually broke into acting.
Desperate to rid himself of his working-class roots and an accent that Americans called ‘Cockney’, Grant told US interviewers that he’d gone to the Bristol public school Clifton College.
He changed his name to the far posher-sounding Cary Grant in 1931 on the orders of Paramount Pictures, to which he was contracted after moving to Los Angeles.
She once woke to find her intensely jealous husband with his hands around her throat.
Every Sunday morning Grant phoned his mother, whom he had moved from the mental hospital to private accommodation, and visited her once a year. Grant’s own home movies show these bustling, all-day parties, and the deep dark tan he developed spending the day in the sun with his friends.
So, I think it might not be a common misconception, but it’s certainly a rumor out there.”
Now, Jennifer hopes to explore more about her father’s life in the scripted series Archie. TOM LEONARD explores the Hollywood legend's legacy
He was an actor who married five times, on the final occasion to a woman 46 years his junior.
His father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother was taken away from him and put in an asylum. By 1933, Grant had appeared in two box-office hits, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, but both were Mae West vehicles in which he was barely noticed. Scott, too, made a lot of films without much success, including the flop Hot Saturday, in which he and Grant vied for the affections of star Nancy Carroll.
His marriage to Rambova ended in 1925, which left some speculating that the marriages of the “pink powder puff” (a nickname Valentino acquired after playing effeminate roles on screen) were coverups to keep the sex symbol’s reputation intact.
Identifying how many Hollywood couples tied the knot to cloak their sexuality is, of course problematic since it’s primarily based on speculation_._
“I think the hardest thing for a historian is to kind of sift through what the rumor [is] and what is actually factual," says Tropiano.
One commonly cited source for speculation is the memoir of Scotty Bowers, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.