Cary Grant

Cary Grant was an English-American actor whose 34-year film career across 1932–1966 — comprising 76 feature films — produced one of the defining bodies of work in American 20th-century film comedy and romance. He was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904, in Horfield, Bristol, England, into a working-class English family. His father Elias James Leach was a Bristol clothing-pressing factory worker and his mother Elsie Maria Kingdon was a homemaker. The 1914 institutionalization of his mother in the Bristol Lunatic Asylum (without her son's knowledge — he was told she had died, and only learned the truth at age 31 in 1935) shaped his subsequent emotional life.

His 1918 expulsion from Fairfield Grammar School at age 14 launched his early acting career with the Bob Pender Stage Troupe — a juvenile vaudeville comedy and acrobatic troupe — across 1918–1922. The 1920 Pender Troupe American tour produced his 1920 first US arrival at age 16. He stayed in New York at the 1922 conclusion of the tour and worked in stilt-walking, vaudeville, and Broadway musicals across 1923–1931 under his birth name Archie Leach.

His 1931 Paramount Pictures Hollywood signing — with the studio-imposed stage name Cary Grant (drawn from his role as "Cary Lockwood" in his 1931 Broadway musical Nikki) — launched his American film career. His 1934–1944 screwball-comedy peak produced multiple defining American films: The Awful Truth (1937, opposite Irene Dunne), Bringing Up Baby (1938, the Howard Hawks romantic comedy opposite Katharine Hepburn), His Girl Friday (1940, the Howard Hawks newspaper comedy opposite Rosalind Russell), The Philadelphia Story (1940, opposite Hepburn and James Stewart), and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, the Frank Capra dark comedy).

His four Alfred Hitchcock collaborations — Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959) — produced one of the defining director-actor partnerships in American 20th-century film. Grant retired from film acting in 1966 at age 62 following the birth of his only daughter Jennifer. He died on November 29, 1986, at age 82, in Davenport, Iowa, of a stroke. He received the 1970 Honorary Academy Award and the 1981 Kennedy Center Honor.

His name Cary began as a studio-assigned stage name (originally an English place-name and surname). Cary was a popular American boys' name through the 1940s and 1950s.