Elsie Leach

Elsie Maria Kingdon married Elias Leach in Bristol in 1898. Their first son, John, died in infancy, and their second, Archibald Alexander Leach — the future Cary Grant — was born in 1904. By most accounts Elsie was an anxious, grieving presence in the household after John's death, and in January 1915, when Archibald was nine years old, Elias had her committed to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, later known as Glenside Hospital. Archibald was told his mother had gone away, and eventually came to believe she had died; he was not informed of her committal or her whereabouts. Elsie remained institutionalised for roughly two decades. In 1935, following his father Elias's death, Grant — by then thirty-one and a rising Paramount star — learned that his mother was alive, and travelled to re-establish contact with her. He supported her financially for the rest of her life and visited Bristol periodically over the following decades. Elsie Leach died in 1973, at the age of ninety-five, having lived to see her son's full career unfold from a distance neither of them had chosen.