"There is a major and very difficult realisation that needs to be made about Grant -- ...he is the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema."

Men wanted to be him; women just wanted him. In 72 films made over 34 years, he captured the heart and imagination of the world. And in an effort to have increased control over the roles he played, he revolutionized the way Hollywood dealt with actors.

American by choice (he legalized his name and became a U.S. citizen on June 26, 1942) he was a staunch patriot during an era when Hollywood’s golden image was tarnished by the cloud of the McCarthy hearings. Leaving his lower class British roots behind, Cary Grant reinvented himself, becoming the ultimate man of the world.

Grant played rich men, poor men, angels and rogues, each one more appealing than the last. Whether portraying a gambler (Mr. Lucky, 1943) soldier (I Was A Male War Bride, 1949), a submarine commander (Operation Petticoat, 1959), a nineteenth century British naval officer (The Pride and the Passion, 1957), a newspaper editor (His Girl Friday, 1940), an archeologist (Bringing Up Baby, 1938), a business man (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, 1948; Indiscreet, 1958; North By Northwest, 1959; That Touch of Mink, 1962...), a US Treasury agent (Charade, 1963), a crusty recluse (Father Goose, 1964) a physician (Every Girl Should Be Married, 1948; Crisis, 1950; People Will Talk, 1951) or a jewel thief (To Catch a Thief, 1955) Cary Grant was the epitomy of elegance, a charismatic and self-confident, self-mocking man. He loved and admired women as much for their intelligence, strength and ideosyncracies as for their beauty and softness. Unthreatened either by powerful women or the competition of other men, the characters played by Grant were friends as well as lovers.

Rising from the poverty of Bristol, England where he was born on January 18, 1904, Grant was the son of Elias Leach, a suit pressor at a local clothing factory. His mother, Elsie Leach, the daughter of laborers, was a woman haunted by the 1900 death of her first child due to tubercular menigitis. Little John had died just prior to his first birthday and his mother’s ongoing depression influenced every aspect of her overprotective relationship with her second child, Archie.

Archibald Alec Leach entered show business at the tender age of six (according to biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley) when his father signed his custody over to vaudvillian Robert Lomas. He returned to Bristol and his parents a year later, having been bitten permanently by the show biz bug. When he was eight, he returned from a walk to find his mother missing and was told by his father that she had suffered a heart attack and died.