Graham McCann is Britain’s leading writer about film and TV. He has written four biographies for Fourth Estate, Cary Grant: A Class Apart (1997), Morecambe and Wise (1999), Dad’s Army – The Story of a Classic Television Show (2001) and Frankie Howerd (2004). He also writes regularly on politics and culture for a wide range of publications.
"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant," said Archie Leach, better known as Hollywood star Cary Grant. A professor at Kings College, Cambridge, and author of biographies on Marilyn Monroe, Woody Allen, and James Dean and Marlon Brando, McCann discovers how that wish came to be at least partially fulfilled. He traces the life of Leach from his 1904 birth in working-class Bristol, England, to his death as Cary Grant on the international lecture circuit in 1986. McCann charts Archie Leach's humble vaudeville beginnings, the invention of Cary Grant in Hollywood, and Leach/ Grant's rise to international fame. He explores personal issues such as Grant's relationship with his mother, his sexuality, his use of LSD, and his World War II spy activities. Though there have been more than ten biographies of Cary Grant, McCann's adds sensitivity, scholarship, and insight to that list. This excellent work will appeal to general readers browsing biography and film collections of both academic and public libraries.‘Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., Va.
McCann, an instructor at King's College, Cambridge, and the author of previous film books (Woody Allen: New Yorker and Rebel Males: Clint, Brando, and Dean) opens with a disturbing event in his subject's youth. In 1913, when Archibald Alexander Leach was nine, he came home from school one day to be told his mother had gone away for a short holiday. The truth was that his father had put Elsie Leach in a mental institution. Only after his father's 1935 death, did he learn his mother was alive, and the two were reunited. But by that time Archie Leach was Cary Grant, a Hollywood celebrity who had already made the first 20 of his 72 feature films. His screen presence was so Olympian that when he died in 1986, the New York Times wrote, "Cary Grant was not supposed to die." More than a dozen previous books about the actor are available, but McCann's well-researched addition is particularly valuable for its careful investigation of old canards. Dispelling myths, analyzing comedy techniques and rehashing anecdotes, the author sweeps through all corners of the actor's life-therapy, LSD use, the failure of several marriages, "yet to be proven" activities as a WWII spy on behalf of England and persistent rumors of homosexuality. Still, the book's outstanding centerpiece is "Inventing Cary Grant," in which McCann investigates the accents, role models, fashion choices and acting styles which led Leach to cultivate and polish his chosen persona. First serial to the Boston Globe. Photos. (Feb.)
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