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The Ottawa Citizen (01/Dec/1986) - Films lose elegant legend: Cary Grant remembered as handsome, witty, stylish

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Films lose elegant legend: Cary Grant remembered as handsome, witty, stylish

HOLLYWOOD — The death of Cary Grant Saturday night has left Hollywood without one of the most elegant of the leading men who sauntered across the screen during the last 50 years.

"Cary has so much skill that he makes it all look easy," Frank Sinatra said in 1969 in presenting him with a special Academy Award inscribed "to Cary Grant, for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting" during his 35-year, 72-film career.

Grant died at 11:22 p.m. Saturday after suffering a massive stroke at St. Luke's hospital in Davenport, Iowa. His fifth wife, Barbara, was at his side.

Grant had gone back to his hotel after becoming ill about 5 p.m. during a rehearsal of his one-man show called A Conversation With Cary Grant at the Adler Theatre in Davenport.

In Los Angeles, where Grant's body was returned Sunday, his lawyer, Stanley Fox, said, "The family wishes no service and no funeral is planned." Instead, the body will be cremated.

Grant was twice nominated for Academy Awards in earlier years — for his portrayal of a London street tough in the 1944 film None but the Lonely Heart — his major achievement as a serious actor, although he was a bit too old for the part — and for his role as a star-crossed newspaperman in the 1941 film Penny Serenade, in which he wooed, won and cherished Irene Dunne. His last film role was in Walk, Don't Run released in 1966.

"He was the most handsome, witty, and stylish leading man both on and off the screen," said Eva Marie Saint, who starred with him in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest.

"I adored him and it's a sad loss for all of us," she said.

Doris Day, who starred with Grant in That Touch of Mink, called him a genius and the "classiest" man she ever met.

"I never had the good fortune to work with him, but as everyone who makes films knows he was as close to being unique as anyone this side of Charlie Chaplin," said Charleton Heston.

Grant's success came after a humble beginning: he grew up as plain Archie Leach, the son of a garment industry employee in the noisy British port of Bristol, where he was born on Jan. 18, 1904. He broke into show business as an acrobatic dancer with a troupe that toured vaudeville houses in Britain's provinces. Stilt-walking was one of his specialties.

One reason for Grant's enduring stardom was his distinctive on-screen presence.

Another reason was his crisp acting technique: "He never wasted a moment on the screen; every movement meant something to him," the director Alan J. Pakula once said admiringly. Still a third reason, as the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael noted, was the way his performances nourished movie-goers' fantasies.

Grant, Kael wrote, "had the longest romantic reign in the short history of movies."

He was paired with Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. To him Mae West tendered the most famous, and frequently misquoted, proposition in movie history: "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"

He made his New York stage debut in the lavish 1927 musical Golden Dawn, and the following season, he appeared in the musical Boom-Boom.

The next few years were busy on stage, but in 1931, he bought a second-hand car, and drove to Hollywood, where he was put under contract by Paramount, which offered the tall and lanky, 27-year-old a five-year contract at $450 a week. He took it. It was the last contract he would ever need.

But first, there was the name to change. He took "Cary" from the character he played on the stage and "Grant" from a list proffered by a studio executive. He set up house in Santa Monica with actor Randolph Scott, with whom he would live, off and on, for years.

Grant's good looks would suit him well through 72 films. But his comic flair soon was apparent, notably under Lowell Sherman's tongue-in-cheek direction in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong. In that film he played a lawman, disguised as a church missionary, who won the heart of a saloon keeper played by Mae West.

In Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Grant had a chance at some character acting: he was cast as a raffish Cockney doing a bit of swindling in cahoots with Katharine Hepburn.

In the great hit Topper (1937), he played a wild sophisticate. Later that year, in The Awful Truth, a drawing-room comedy, he played a charming divorced man who got back together with his wife, portrayed by Dunne. That movie was a tremendous success, too, and it proved that Grant was a "bankable" star — an actor whose name on a marquee draws moviegoers into the theatre.

Now established as one of Hollywood's reigning stars, Grant played in a succession of films, including Holiday (1938), Gunga Din (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940) — a remake of The Front Page — My Favorite Wife (1940), and The Philadelphia Story, which opened in 1941, not long before he became a United States citizen.

In 1941, Grant also appeared in Suspicion, the first of four suspense films he starred in under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. The others, all top box-office money-makers, were Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959).

In 1964, looking around for a part that was appropriate for his age — he was then 60 — Grant played an unshaven hermit on a South Pacific island in Father Goose, which was directed by Ralph Nelson.

The film was a disappointment and after one more role in Walk, Don't Run Grant quit making movies for good.

Since his retirement, he had served on the corporate boards of MGM, Faberge, Western Airlines and the Hollywood Park race track. He also spent much of his time at his Beverly Hills estate with his fifth wife, Barbara, and his only child, 20-year-old Jennifer.

Reuters news agency reported Sunday that friends of the actor said Grant left the bulk of a fortune estimated as high as $60 million to Jennifer.

He remained a star even in retirement, because television reruns of his old films kept his face before the public.

During one of his rare interviews, he said the oft-quoted "Ju-dee, Ju-dee, Ju-dee" was actually started by an unknown impersonator. But it became a stylistic symbol of his Cockney-but-classy accent. Asked which movie he starred in was his favorite, Grant said, "I've enjoyed them all," but he admitted particularly enjoying making Indiscreet with Ingrid Bergman.

The role he liked the least was the bungling young nephew in Arsenic and Old Lace.

His favorite director was Alfred Hitchcock, who guided him in four films, and whose presence Grant said was felt and reacted to by everyone on the set.

Four of Grant's marriages ended in divorce. His first was to actress Virginia Cherrill in 1934. They divorced after 13 months, with her accusing him of physical and verbal abuse. He married Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in 1942; they divorced in 1945.

In 1949 he married actress Betsy Drake. Their union lasted seven years, and was formally dissolved in 1962.

In the late 1950s, Grant's psychiatrist tried to help him probe his psyche with LSD, which then was believed to free the mind for faster analysis.

Grant and actress Dyan Cannon dated for four years and were married in 1965, when he was 61 and she 30. They separated after 17 months, after the birth of Grant's only child, Jennifer.

Cannon said she found Grant to have extreme mood swings.

He "dominated me completely. I found myself just living to try to please, to keep going."

In 1981, Grant married Barbara Harris, a public-relations director for a London hotel and 47 years his junior. The fifth Mrs. Grant later said the age difference was an advantage.