To the outsider, Cary Grant seemed to have it all. Charm, good looks, sophistication, wealth, urbanity, humour, and the kind of once-in-a-lifetime talent that took him from Bristol to Hollywood and a clutch of Oscars. Women wanted to marry him, while men wanted to be him. But some things are not what they seem.
Beneath his uber-suave veneer lay something much darker. The persona of “Cary Grant” was an illusion – an illusion the star, who was born Archie Leach, created himself in order to hide the devastating truth about his traumatic early years.
It’s this early life and how it affected him forever that is the subject of a brilliant new ITV drama, Archie, penned by award-winning screenwriter, Jeff Pope, and featuring Harry Potter star Jason Isaacs as Grant.
“The more I researched and, eventually, the more people I spoke to who knew Cary, the clearer it became that ‘Cary Grant’ was a creation of his own making,” Isaacs reveals.
“It was a fiction. He spent most of his adult life relentlessly searching for relief from the childhood demons that never stopped haunting him. He suffered from nightmares that woke him up screaming and crying.”
Archie narrates the story of a young Archibald Alexander Leach’s troubled childhood. Born in 1904, to parents Elsie and Elias, his alcoholic, violent father abandoned him, his older brother died, he lost his critical, controlling and depressed mother early, and his alcoholic grandmother neglected even to feed him.
To survive, Archie had to completely erase his past. He worked his way up through the British music hall circuit before travelling to New York in the 1920s and establishing himself as a vaudeville star.
He moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, changed his name to Cary Grant and became a star – all the while trying to escape his tortuous past.
“Before Cary Grant, there was Archie Leach,” Isaacs continues. “He wanted the world to love him, needed the world to, in order to prove that he was worth loving.
His controlling behaviour off-screen, his emotional dysfunction, his broken marriages… were all symptoms of deep and open wounds.
“He trusted no one and nothing. In many ways success made him even more anxious, obsessive, and insecure. He was one of the most famous people in the world. He played the perfect man, leading the perfect life.
“Many of us see people with lives that seem perfect, but none of them are. Nobody has a perfect life.”
Isaacs displays a chameleon-like quality, the ability to shed his own skin, so to speak, and totally absorb and inhabit the persona, psyche and soul of the character he’s playing. In real life he couldn’t be more charming and courteous yet he played with aplomb one of the most despotic characters in recent cinematic history – the white-haired, death eater Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter film franchise.
But it’s not just fictional characters he imbues with his acting alchemy. He played Steptoe and Son’s Harry H Corbett in TV play The Curse of Steptoe, Marshal Georgy Zhukov in political satire The Death of Stalin and Admiral John Henry Godfrey in the movie Operation Mincemeat.
However, his portrayal of Cary Grant is so on-the-money that even Grant’s fourth wife, actress Dyan Cannon, (the star married a fifth and final time after their divorce), an executive producer on Archie and played in the drama by Laura Aikman, commented: “Jason is a genius – he put himself on the line and he did a masterful job.”
Yet when Isaacs was first approached to play the title role, he admits his instinct was to run for the hills.
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“My first thought was, ‘What idiot has written a biopic of Cary Grant?’ I mean, why? Why would anyone think it was a good idea to try and portray the life of an icon who had been the biggest star in the world for 30 years?
“And what kind of moron actor would attempt to play a man who is still, almost 40 years after his death, legendary for being the very epitome of suave, lady-killing manliness? But I knew Jeff Pope’s impressive body of work and didn’t think he was an idiot! And then when I read the script, it was clear that the mini-series was about Archie Leach not Cary Grant.
“I would never have been foolish enough to try to step into Cary Grant’s shoes but I knew I could try and portray Archie.
“Archie Leach couldn’t have been further away from Cary Grant – the character he’d invented to save himself. In fact, I recognised myself in him. Let’s just say I thought I could play a really messed-up man who could fake many things in many situations. It’s possibly why I ended up acting. I was constantly curious about people who fit comfortably in their own skin. Were they faking it?
“How could they be so certain about things? Then I discovered the rehearsal room, where you could delve into other people’s heads and hearts. Actually, that’s still what I love most about my work. Anyway, I said yes to Archie and ran at it, full tilt.”
Isaacs may not have felt he was playing Grant but he still had to look like the man Dyan Cannon described as the “most beautiful man in any room. So beautiful that nobody could take their eyes off him, men or women”.
Isaacs is decidedly easy on the eye but still… “Despite our incredible make-up and hair department I knew I needed the willing participation of the audience,” he smiles. “For them to come along for the ride. If they could imagine me as the outer Cary, I’d do my best to show the inner Archie.”
His outer Cary is still pretty darned hot, though. Debonair doesn’t come close and, oh, his immaculate clothes. “His father pressed clothes and had given Archie advice that stuck with him – that you are judged first by your clothes,” says Isaacs. “Being poor, they revered the rich people with nice clothes. Like in many other areas of his life, Cary Grant was absolutely obsessive about where he got his clothes from.
“One surprising thing I found out was that right up to the 1950s the biggest movie stars in the world were being paid a fortune, but they had to provide their own costumes as part of the contract. Cary mostly used Savile Row tailors in London. His clothes were always a classic cut. Everybody wanted to dress like him, and he took it very seriously. He would send them back if the cuts were a millimetre too long. He spent a fortune and insisted they made things exactly how he wanted them.
“He also dressed his wives – like accessories – they needed to look right. Dyan found it charming at first, but then it was just another area where Cary had to have absolute control.”
All Isaacs’ clothes for the part were handmade, many in London’s Savile Row.
“Every single bump and contour of my body was compensated for or highlighted by these extraordinary artists. They were made for me on behalf of some of England’s brilliant costume houses and so they go back into stock. Unfortunately for me!”
There was also Grant’s unique mid-Atlantic drawl to master. That famous, utterly idiosyncratic voice that’s actually mostly remembered not for itself, but for Tony Curtis’s parody of it in the film Some Like It Hot. Off-screen, Grant sounded far more English.
“It surprised me when Jennifer – Cary and Dyan’s daughter – told me he corrected her pronunciation a lot, insisting that she pronounce things the ‘proper, English way’.”
Isaacs continues: “His film voice was so constructed and contrived I knew it wasn’t the voice he would have used at breakfast or when angry or upset. I was desperate to find a candid recording of him talking but he was so guarded and private none existed – no talk shows, no impromptu speeches, nothing. Finally, I tracked down a man who, as a student radio journalist, had recorded a phone interview in Cary’s final year, 1986.”
The actor had asked that the interview was not recorded but a sound engineer secretly did so without the journalist realising.
“He’d never played it to anyone out of a sense of guilt and responsibility but, after a little persuasion and a lot of begging, shared it with me for the duration of filming. It was a real revelation.”
As for his own life, Isaacs, 60, is married to documentary maker Emma Hewitt and they have daughters, Lily, 21, and 18-year-old Ruby.
He’s most definitely a family man and it seems Emma ensures he never gets a big head.
“When I was away recently, Emma, who goes to bed early because she has long Covid, mentioned she was looking for a good movie to watch. I suggested Archie, which I had on my laptop,” he laughs. “I got home at 1am and couldn’t believe she was still awake. She had binge-watched all four episodes of Archie.
“I asked her what she thought. ‘Oh, Laura’s so good as Dyan, isn’t she?’
Emma replied. ‘The producers must have thanked their lucky stars when she walked in the room’.”
● Archie starts tonight at 9pm on ITVX
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