Archie Leach and the Invention of Cary Grant

Archibald Alexander Leach was born on 18 January 1904 in a terraced house on Hughenden Road in the Horfield district of Bristol, the son of a tailor's presser and a mother whose disappearance, at the time unexplained, would shape the rest of his life. He was told she had gone to a seaside resort and never returned. He was twenty-nine, working in Hollywood under a different name, before he learned the truth: his father had committed her to a mental institution, Glenside, and left her there for over twenty years.

That single fact does more to explain Cary Grant than any account of his tailoring or his timing. A child who is told his mother is dead, and who later discovers she has been alive the entire time in an asylum an hour from where he grew up, does not emerge with an uncomplicated relationship to trust, abandonment, or performance. Grant spoke about it rarely and carefully in later life, usually only when a psychiatrist or a journalist earned the right to ask. What he did instead, for most of six decades, was build a surface so accomplished that almost nobody thought to look underneath it.

Bristol in the 1910s was a working port city, and the Hippodrome, which opened in 1912 two streets from where the Leach family lived, gave the boy his first sustained look at professional performance — vaudeville, music hall, touring revues. He later said he could not remember a time before he wanted to be part of what happened on that stage rather than in the seats watching it. At Fairfield Grammar School he was an unremarkable, occasionally troublesome student, more interested in the theatre than in his studies, and he was expelled at fourteen — the given reason was trespassing backstage at the Hippodrome, though accounts differ on the precise offence.

What is not in dispute is what happened next. Leach sought out Bob Pender, who ran a well-regarded troupe of comic acrobats and stilt-walkers, and talked his way into an apprenticeship, forging his father's signature on the necessary consent. He was fourteen, effectively unsupervised, and being trained in a discipline — knockabout comedy, tumbling, mime, the manipulation of one's own body as an instrument of laughter — that has no equivalent in a conventional education for an actor. It gave him something drama school could not: total physical command, and total comfort in front of an audience that had paid to be entertained rather than moved.

The Pender troupe toured the British provinces and, in 1920, sailed for New York with a booking at the Hippodrome Theatre on Sixth Avenue. Leach was sixteen. When the troupe's American tour ended and most of the others returned home, he stayed. This decision — made by a teenager with almost no money, no family support, and no legal status to speak of — is the real origin point of Cary Grant, several years before the name existed. He worked New York vaudeville, Coney Island, and eventually Broadway musical comedy through most of the 1920s, learning to sing passably and dance adequately while his comic and acrobatic skills did the heavier lifting.

The name change came in 1931, on the way into pictures rather than out of Bristol. Paramount signed him and rejected Archie Leach as unsuitable for a leading man — too obviously a stage name already, and not right for the screen. The studio's list of approved alternatives included Cary Lockwood, a role he had played on Broadway in a show called Nikki; the surname Lockwood was already in use by another contract player, so the studio supplied Grant instead, reportedly because it shared initials with Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, an economical piece of brand logic. Cary Grant made his screen debut in This Is the Night in 1932.

He was thirty-four films into his career, already one of the biggest stars in the world, before he addressed the split between the two identities directly and famously: 'Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.' The line is usually quoted for its wit, but it is also a precise piece of self-diagnosis. Grant did not experience Cary Grant as a mask he put on over Archie Leach so much as a character he had built, consciously and with craft, to be everything the frightened, abandoned, undereducated boy from Bristol was not — and he never stopped being aware of the gap between the performance and the performer.

He returned to Bristol only a handful of times as an adult, and reportedly found the visits difficult; the city that had made him, in the sense of poverty and rupture, was not a place he was eager to revisit even after the world had made him into someone else. Late in life he re-established a relationship with his mother, who lived until 1973, visiting her in Bristol and, by several accounts, trying to make up for the decades in which each believed the other lost. Elsie Leach died the year Grant was sixty-nine, having outlived her husband by nearly four decades and having spent a portion of her middle years institutionalised for reasons that remain, to this day, only partly documented.

It would be a mistake to read Cary Grant's screen persona as therapy, and Grant himself resisted simple readings of his own career. But it is also a mistake to separate the performer entirely from the specific, well-documented deprivations of the performer's childhood — the disappeared mother, the absent father, the expulsion, the decision at fourteen to run away with an acrobatic troupe rather than stay in a house that had already emptied itself of the people who were supposed to keep him. The control, the poise, the appearance of never being caught off guard: these were not affectations picked up on a studio lot. They were built, plank by plank, starting in Bristol, by a boy who had already learned that the people closest to you can vanish, and that the way to survive it is to become, publicly and expertly, someone else.