Barbara Harris

Barbara Harris was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1950 and worked in hotel public relations in England, including at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, where she met Cary Grant in 1976 while he was on a business trip. Forty-seven years his junior, she began a relationship with him that developed over several years before the couple married in Las Vegas on 11 April 1981, when Grant was seventy-seven. The marriage was, by the accounts of those close to Grant in his final years, the most settled and content period of his private life. Harris travelled with him throughout the run of A Conversation with Cary Grant, the informal one-man stage show of anecdotes and film clips with which he toured the United States in the 1980s, appearing before audiences who had grown up on his films decades earlier. She was with him in Davenport, Iowa, on 29 November 1986, when he suffered the stroke, backstage before a scheduled performance, that killed him within hours. Since Grant's death, Harris has served as the principal custodian of his estate and image rights, controlling the licensing of his likeness and the release of archival material, and she has supported commemorative efforts including the Cary Comes Home Festival held periodically in his native Bristol. Her decisions about what has and has not been made available to biographers and archivists have shaped, more than those of any other single individual, the public record of Grant's life since his death. She has given occasional interviews about their marriage but has generally maintained the same guardedness about Grant's private life that he cultivated himself, a stance that has left substantial gaps in the documented record of his final decade.