YUZU Productions - 30 rue du Colonel Delorme - F-93100 Montreuil - www.yuzu-productions.com Christian Popp - T : +33 6 75 67 03 11 - [email protected] Nick Ware - T : +33 6 06 60 11 23 - [email protected] For the first time one of Hollywood’s greatest stars tells his own story, in his own words. From a childhood of poverty to global fame, , the ultimate self-made star, explores his own screen image and what it took to create it.

© YUZU Productions 2015 SYNOPSIS Cary Grant is one of the most enduring icons of the Hollywood golden era. Described by the film historian and biographerDavid Thomson as “the greatest screen actor of all time”, Grant is without doubt the actor whose style as the suave and elegant man-in-the-suit has remained iconic and modern: his image is still used in advertising and inspired Don Draper in Mad Men.

Grant played with the notion that the man born Archie Leach had become “Cary Grant” and that this persona, such a powerful target for the audience’s projections, hid a constant search for his true self. In 1958, at the height of his success, Grant is a troubled man in a failing marriage. He becomes one of the first people to experiment with LSD, opening up enormous self-discovery. He continues to take it for many years, and is a primary advocate of its medical properties.

The film opens at this crisis moment of his life, as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest becomes one of his biggest hits and he begins an affair with - emotional, vulnerable and helplessly in love. We travel back with Grant on his long journey of self-discovery: to his poverty-stricken childhood in Bristol, England, and the incarceration of his mother in a mental hospital, a fact hidden from him for 20 years; his long apprenticeship as an acrobat and stage actor, and making 27 films in Hollywood before stardom. This key period is the making and becoming of Cary Grant - his role models, relationships with men, and the birth of the alter-ego that finally made him a star in 1937.

Through his screwball period, his premature retirement and the late 50’s comeback, Grant remained a hugely popular actor but an almost completely unknowable man, not least to his 5 wives. His personal demons, anxieties and frailties were kept hidden. Only Hitchcock captured this darker side, the unknown Grant, in 4 films. For the master of suspense Grant emainedr ‘under suspicion’ as in their first feature together in 1941.

Amongst our interviewees are Cary Grant’s widow Barbara, who give us access to the family archives. Sophia Loren explains how he pleaded with her to marry him and why she – in the end - refused. Judy Balaban took acid with him in 1959; film-makerPeter Medak had lunch with him every week for a year at Universal Studios in 1963. Critic David Thomson and biographer Mark Glancy reveal how his life and work intertwined, and why we still care about him, 30 years after his death.

Above all we will get closer to Archie Leach and Cary Grant than ever before – “The Man from Dream City”, as critic Pauline Kael dubbed him, will finally become flesh and blood. © YUZU Productions 2015 3 TREATMENT Cary Grant never gave a filmed interview – he controlled his image too much to allow it to happen. Our film will instead use primary source material including the autobiography that was never published. We are working with his family to access his home movies, his audio recordings and his many letters to his mother. For the written material, an actor will read these lines, not giving an impersonation, but conveying the tone, emotion and the spirit of Grant.

The film will weave Grant’s re-evaluation of his life on LSD through his career and personal story. We will begin with a recreation of his LSD experience, in a therapists consulting room in Beverley Hills. This will shot in an impressionistic way, with no impersonations. (More details are in the Director’s note).

A narrator will be our guide, supported by our interviewees who will give us crucial insight, first hand recollections or new evidence of Grant’s life and career.

The film will use extensive film clips from Grant’s movies, and related materials fromthe trailers, production stills and other on-set materials. The film clips will both illustrate his career, and act as illustration of his life and as dream and “hallucinatory” imagery as part of the flash backs he experienced whilst on LSD. The visual style will be rich in imagery of Beverly Hills in the 1950’s, Broadway in the 1930’s and Bristol in the 1910’s. This will be achieved with original archive footage, and where necessary some newly shot material, treated and graded to evoke the period.

© YUZU Productions 2015 4 We will film new sequences to illustrate key moments or themes - in particular theacid sessions. Grant also vividly described his childhood home in detail, and we will recreate this classic Edwardian parlour. We will film in a tailors, showing impressionistic images of cutting, measuring, dressing and ironing. This leitmotif will reflect Grant’s own immaculate tailoring, for which he became famous. It is one of the few subjects that he ever wrote about in the first person. His father’s profession was pressing suits, but ironically Grant was forced to wear his mother’s home-made trousers, causing him acute embarrassment as an adolescent. We will film at an acrobatic school to evoke the stilt-walking and tumbling of his days in the Pender troupe.

We will use iconic studio photography and archive stills from throughout his life. In the Margaret Herrick library are Grant’s original papers, and we will film many of these with a rostrum to show the annotations he made to newspaper reviews, to letters, contracts and scripts.

The music will mix original soundtracks from his films, notably Bernard Hermann’s fantastic score for North By Northwest, with contemporary music. We will commission an original soundtrack from an established composer, and we are currently considering one of these artists to give us a surprising sonic landscape, one which will root Grant very much in the present and enable us to see him as a contemporary, not a distant figure.

A LIFE BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each.”

In each of Grant’s life chapters are the remnants of the past and his repressed emotions, but each will also signal changes, as well as ‘trailing’ or anticipating changes that will come in the future. It is possible to see a life pattern of in and out breathing, and of Grant finally finding an equilibrium in fatherhood and retirement. By then he had decided to no longer be a public figure, yet he was tempted back to tour a live show one more time to meet his audience. Throughout, the films in some extraordinary way have mirrored his life journey, as if the producers and Cary knew instinctively what was going on. They will provide a reflection of his inner life, or the lack of it. A contrast of ‘shallow’ versus ‘deep’ mirrors.

©YUZU Productions 2015 5 “There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it.” Bristol beginnings

Cary Grant was born Archie Leach in Bristol England in 1904. His father Elias was a heavy drinker and they were relatively poor, but otherwise his early childhood appeared happy. But at the age of 13 his father had his wife Elsie committed to a mental asylum. The reason? She had discovered his long standing affairs. Many biographers write that Grant was told she was dead; our new research proves that to be false. He was told she had gone away, apparently never to return. Archie’s life began to fall part. “There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it”. He truanted from school and spent much of days on the docks amongst the sailors and prostitutes. “I sat alone for hours watching the ships come and go, sailing with them to far places on the tide of my imagination, trying to release myself from the emotional tensions which disarranged my thoughts”. It was here that he discovered the Hippodrome Theatre. After getting work as a lighting assistant, Grant befriends and finally joins the Bob Pender acrobatic troupe of knockabout comedians. He becomes a stilt-walker, and finds he has a natural talent for acrobatics, and an ability to remain graceful and composed, even when getting a laugh from the audience. It is a talent that he draws on later in his life.

The mood of early 20th century Bristol will be evoked though local film archive reflecting the constraint and rigidity of the era. We will film in his Horfield neighbourhood, his schools and the houses he grew up in, and around the docks where a statue of Grant now resides. The docks will show the call to travel and of re-invention. We reflect the mood of his father’s licentiousness and his drinking, and the dark mood that descends as his mother is locked up. We will film at the asylum, now a museum and a part of the local university. We will show his yearning for escape and the excitement and promise of life in the theatre. Biographer Mark Glancy has walked round all the Grant family houses, and will talk about his early life, illustrated with photographs. We will film at an acrobatic school to reflect the physicality and training that Archie goes through at this period. We will also use clips from his later film “None But The Lonely Heart” in which Grant plays a working class boy with a troubled relationship with his mother and the overbearing memory of his dead father.

©YUZU Productions 2015 6 “I traveled New York City from one end to the other. From the Bronx Zoo to the Battery. I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses.” Escape and beginnings of self-invention

In 1920, the Pender Troupe depart for a season in New York. Archie is 16 when he starts the long voyage on the SS Atlantic. On board are the recently married movie superstars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and Grant befriends them, firing his imagination. Fairbanks sees Grant perform later in the US, and the Fairbanks’ style becomes of the early ingredients of the Grant persona. The Pender Troupe are a big success, playing at the New York Hippodrome to 10,000 people a week, but eventually they must return to England. Archie decides to stay. He knows no-one, has no money. He lives off his wits in New York, meeting fellow expatriate Brits, Australians, and other Europeans. “I traveled New York City from one end to the other. From the Bronx Zoo to the Battery. I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses”. He gets a break on Broadway, and spends the next 10 years rising slowly from bottom of the bill to the top. Many of his performances are poor. His personal archives of cuttings from the time show that he seemed to enjoy the bad reviews, and certainly learnt from them.

In this freewheeling environment, Archie beings to piece together the character that will become Cary Grant. He steals the tailoring, the look and the exaggerated English accent of both Noel Coward and his hero Jack Buchanan. The other great working class English man in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin, provides more inspiration – his drive, his confidence, his great humour. Grant has many affairs, some with men. He shares a house with Orry-Kelly, who was to become one of Hollywood’s great costume designers.

This chapter will begin with themes of cutting ties, uprooting and casting away; the anxiety of a new life, but the excitement of the unknown. We will evoke the buses he constantly rode across town, the new sense of freedom with New York as its symbol. We will use archive of New York in the 1920’s, the jazz age at its height, sexual freedom and the boom in the theatre and musicals. We will use more of the specially shot material of the acrobats as we watch Archie turn into a young man and finally break away. A freeing of the body, and a freeing of the mind. The city becomes a laboratory of self-creation -California is one step beyond.

We will show how he adopted the middle/upper class English gentleman persona that becomes his trade mark, with images and archive of his heroes and the musical theatre of the day. He begins to learn his craft as a straight man, a comedian and finally a leading man. There will be stills and early archive of Coward, Buchanan, and Chaplin. This is half way to his journey of becoming Cary Grant. David Thomson and Mark Glancy will set the scene of the period and Grant’s role within it.

©YUZU Productions 2015 7 “It was years before I could move at ease before a camera.”

Hollywood, the Paramount years

Archie Leach decides to take a vacation to California in 1931. Through a series of connections he finds himself screen-tested then put under contract by Paramount. The name Cary comes from him, Grant from the studio. In his first film This Is The Night the Grant image seems set – the besuited metropolitan man in a drawing room comedy. But he is very bad, and it’s a big flop. Grant hated it, thinking of quitting the movies. Instead he makes 27 films in the next five years. It’s a very long apprenticeship. The gauche young man of the very early pictures finally gives way to a more confident performer. “In 1932 on the first morning of shooting director Joseph Von Sternberg suddenly stopped everything, grabbed a comb, and parted my hair on the wrong side, where it’s been ever since. He bemoaned, berated and beseeched me to relax, but it was years before I could move at ease before a camera.”

There are some good films with some very good co-stars – Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn; some have great directors, but it’s not until 1937 that Grant begins to shine.

In his private life, Grant begins a long term intimate relationship with the actor Randolph Scott. For many this was an overt love affair, and considered an open secret in Hollywood. The famous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper frequently insinuated so in her columns, and made Cary Grant a regular victim of her barbed sarcasm. But many close to him still deny that there was ever a sexual relationship. Whatever the truth, Paramount Studios publicity department frequently paired them together, interviewed cooking together in the house that they shared, washing up (Grant washes, Scott dries) and posing by the poolside. These iconic images are much more celebrated today than they were in the 1930s. Yet simultaneously, Grant also gets married, to actress Cherrill. It lasts barely a year. Cherrill is on tape telling how he hit her and had tried to kill her. What we will reveal is that these events occurred at the same time Grant discovered that his father had died and that his mother is in an asylum. Our new evidence will show that he has a breakdown, which leads to his violent behaviour.

This period will be dominated by the apprenticeship, leaving Archie Leach behind, and changing his name. The importance of this re-invention cannot be over-estimated. We will use several of his films to show the transformation, the studio actor being moulded. The rise of the cardboard cut-out. Early on he is the ‘looker’, the male sex object, the dream boy. His films with Mae West and Marlene Dietrich will demonstrate this. ©YUZU Productions 2015 8 The relationship with Scott will be illustrated by the extensive photographic archive, newspaper articles, and some of Grant’s own letters. There is some newsreel of the two of them. We will reflect on his ambiguous sexual allure and public image and show how the two are mutually supportive. In Sylvia Scarlett, a daring George Cukor film from 1936, Grant acts opposite Katherine Hepburn who plays a woman disguised as a boy, exploring themes of both homosexual and lesbian desire.

The moment he discovers his mother is still alive will be a key turning point in the story. We will show the letters that passed between them in the early years of their reconciliation and see the documents relating to her incarceration and release. Virginia Cherrill gave a recorded interview to an author for a book – but it’s never been heard before. We will use this startling audio archive to show her feelings for Grant. Mark Glancy has extensively researched this period, and he is a key contributor here. It is his original work that will inform this period – the moment of realization of his mother’s death and the apprenticeship in movies which he has studied in great detail.

©YUZU Productions 2015 9 “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

The emergence of Cary Grant

When his contract with Paramount comes to an end, Grant becomes the first true freelance in Hollywood. He takes control of his career and the development of his persona. Director Leo McCarey is the first to bring the Grant we know to the screen. In The Awful Truth Grant improvises scenes and incorporates physical comedy; he allows his personal warmth and his humour to break through. The character of Jerry Warriner sets a template – the sophisticated man in the suit, attractive to women, and in the classic screwball style, combative with them. The verbal sparring that is the hallmark of the genre suits Grant to a tee. He is ever-playful with his own image and origins, making references to “Old Archie Leach” in his movies, and naming his dog Archie. The Awful Truth is a big it, soon to be followed by several more classic films – Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story are all shot in the next 3 years. Grant extended his range with Howard Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings, and begins to show a depth to his acting in Penny Serenade, which earns him his first Oscar nomination. On the eve of America joining World War Two he makes Suspicion, his first film with Alfred Hitchcock, which draws out the dark side of Grant. The ending had Grant as a killer – test screenings made the studio change it because the audience wouldn’t accept it.

In his private life Grant continues his friendship with Randolph Scott. In 1940 they finally make a film together, My Favourite Wife, and were rarely apart on set.

In this period we assess the defining characteristics of “Cary Grant”. Critic David Thomson is our principle witness. He will show how the screwball style utilized all Grant’s physical skills, beneath the veneer of the smartly tailored fast-talking metropolitan. Grant has taken control of his career, and makes almost all the right choices. But beneath it allies the troubled relationship with his mother, brushed under the carpet. The letters from his mother, ever more desperate, will be a recurring leitmotif in the film. He starts to visit her in England, but will always keep the Atlantic Ocean between them, never allowing her enough money to travel to the US and live near him. The relationship with Randolph Scott continues in private and in public on screen. Grant is single again and the gossip columnists talk often about him.

We will show scenes from many of these classic films, and reveal how they were to echo his life off screen. The man-about-town is seen at premieres and parties in Hollywood in archive and in stills. The great film critic Pauline Kael will be seen, and we will quote from her brilliant essay “The Man From Dream City”. We will celebrate Hollywood in pictures in the Golden Age.

©YUZU Productions 2015 10 “Our marriage had little foundation for a promising future.”

The War Years -The dark side emerges on screen and off

Cary Grant has a good war – he doesn’t sign up, but performs often for troops and donates large amounts of his personal wealth to the war effort. But the dark side of him is returning, foreshadowed by the mood of the period. He is haunted by the spectre of Archie Leach. Almost as if he needed to counteract the slick surface image, Grant seems to address his own life on screen with None But the Lonely Heart, written and directed by celebrated left wing writer, Clifford Odets. Grant plays a working class man, a Cockney, troubled by his relationship with his mother and haunted by his dead father’s reputation. Grant insists Odets directs it. The film is sombre and bleak – and despite its lack of box office wins him another Oscar nomination, and a win for his screen mother Ethel Barrymore.

In 1942 Cary surprises everyone by marrying the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton – one of the richest women in America. They are nicknamed “Cash and Cary”. She has an obsession with European aristocracy and money, but Grant dislikes the European and neo-European rich that he is forced to call his family and friends. “Our marriage had little foundation for a promising future. Our backgrounds — family, educational and cultural — were completely unalike. During war years and my absences from home on Army-camp, USO-entertainment and hospital tours, we had little opportunity to discuss, or to learn from and adjust to, each other’s divergent points of view; and, by that means, to close the wide gap between our individual beliefs and upbringings. It could have benefited us both. I doubt if anyone ever understood Barbara. But then I doubt if Barbara ever understood herself.”

As Cary’s mood and personality darken and deepen, he is with someone who is the complete opposite. Hutton and her friends would have hated the politics explicit in None But The Lonely Heart, later to be quoted as communist propaganda in the McCarthy trials. It accentuates his own deepening as he detaches from the marriage. His sense of self (true to Archie Leach) begins to define itself. In this chapter we will explicitly contrast the two worlds of his mother’s own life, reflected in her letters, his screen mother and the playboy lifestyle with his wife. We will use the film clips to point and counterpoint the story, and use contemporary newsreel footage and stills.

©YUZU Productions 2015 11 “All my life, I’ve been going around in a fog. You spend your time getting to be a big Hollywood actor. But then what?”

The Betsy Drake years: crisis, retirement and return to new glory

As World War Two ends, Grant makes on his very best films –Notorious with Alfred Hitchcock, co-starring Ingrid Bergman. This magnificent film about secret agents and former Nazi officers shows Grant as unsympathetic, selfish and full of self-loathing. It is one of his best performances. He makes two great films with Howard Hawks –I Was A Male War Bride and Monkey Business, which play with his sexual allure and screen image – in the former, he dresses as a woman for half the film, in the latter he is transformed by a chemical formula into a younger, happier, sexier man.

Grant marries for the third time to actress Betsy Drake on Christmas Day 1949. She had a profound effect on him. “Betsy was good for me. Without imposition or demand, she patiently led me toward an appreciation for better books, better literature. Her cautious but steadily penetrative seeking in the labyrinths of the subconscious gradually provoked my interest. Just as she no doubt intended. The seeking is, of course, endless, but, I thankfully acknowledge of constantly growing benefit.”

These “deepening” years lead him to question his role as an actor. He thinks it’s a shallow and transitory profession. He believes the public is growing bored of him, and he announces his retirement. But Hitchcock offers him a role he can’t turn down – filming in the South of France with a young actress that Grant admires. To Catch A Thief with Grace Kelly becomes one of his greatest successes, and reinvigorates his passion for film-making. He becomes close to Kelly and to Rainier, and is a frequent guest in Monaco throughout their lives.

This chapter begins on the dark side, reflecting the post war era, the mood of his latest film, and his deepening quest to understand and improve himself. His marriage to Betsy represents a turning point and another plunge inwards and backwards, a reflection on the making of “Cary Grant” in the company of a perceptive woman. She uses hypnotism on him to break down his defences. With it, he gives up smoking. Our images will move from the noirish shades of Notorious into the bright Provençal Technicolor summer of To Catch A Thief. Grant remained close to Betsy Drake long after they separated, because of her understanding of his inner world / his deeper psyche, his needs, intellectually and emotionally. We will see her interviewed in archive recordings.

©YUZU Productions 2015 12 “I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn’t know were there. Now I know that I hurt every woman I loved.”

The acid years - The path to self-knowledge

Inspired by Betsy Drake’s successful therapy for alcoholism and keen to get to grips with the demons still haunting him, he starts a weekly series of LSD sessions with Doctors’ Chandler and Hartman.

“One becomes a battleground of old and new beliefs. Of nightmares beyond description. I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy sights, through a montage of intense hate and love, a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling; through terrifying depths of dark despair replaced by glorious heaven like religious symbolisms. Session after session. Week after week”

Grant has two other major events in his life at this time. He meets Sophia Loren and falls desperately in love with her. Freed by the acid experience, he is vulnerable and quick to profess his love, and asks her to marry him. They make two films together – the first during their affair, the second, once it is finished. Their emotions are clear to see as they burn off the screen.

Between these two he makes his final Hitchcock film North by Northwest, a film shot through with questions around identity. It is one his best films and biggest successes. He starts his own production company and becomes again one of the richest and most successful stars in Hollywood.

His passion for LSD is untamable, and he excitedly communicates this to journalists. His outpourings on “being born again” are astounding. But before publication of the first of these, he is advised that it could be a disaster, and he tries to take legal action to get it stopped. He fails, and as a consequence his acid experiences become wide public knowledge. Finally comfortable with the fact, he writes and speaks about it often for the next few years.

This sequence will use extensively his thoughts from these newspaper articles and the autobiography he started, never to complete. The visual style will be rich, dream-like and bright with colour and light as we experience his rebirth. Principal witness is Judy Balaban who will explain in detail how and where he took acid and the impact it had on him. Secondly we will interview Sophia Loren, who will explore their affair in great detail, the vulnerability he showed her, and her decision not to marry him. Themes of identity will be crucial to the chapter – the nature of love and faith, his relationship with Loren and his rejuvenation in his acting and business life. It will play with themes of who people think you are, who you really are; how you can play the person the others think you are; of looking back and (re)constructing a narrative; of being “mistaken”. His widow Barbara Jaynes will describe the longer term impact of acid on Grant in his later life.

©YUZU Productions 2015 13 “After all those years, I’m rid of guilt, complexes and fears, at last I am close to happiness.”

Reconciliation and fulfillment (1961-1986)

The early sixties are a golden time for his film career. He has huge success as he becomes comfortable in his own skin, freed to be more of himself on screen, relaxed, witty, self-reflective. He comes to terms with his age in a comedic way, especially with Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In Father Goose the character he plays looks back at his conventional life as a “suit”. In the film he is a man who has chosen freedom and withdrawn from the world, an unshaven recluse who doesn’t give a damn – and who looks his age. It should have been his last film, but one more very poor movie, which has him standing on the side walk wearing just a towel aged 62, led him to quit acting for good. He turns away from cinema and widens his friendship network, rarely talking about the past, throwing his energies into family, business, and working for Fabergé as an international ambassador. The private jet that is part of his remuneration allows him to travel often, especially back to Britain.

Most importantly of all, he becomes a father. In 1966 his daughter Jennifer is born to Dyan Cannon. Jennifer becomes his whole world, even after he divorces Dyan. He spent as much time as possible with Jennifer, doting on her, playing with her, sending her notes and recording messages on a Dictaphone.

In 1981 he meets his fifth wife, Barbara. She is 47 years his junior, but still the marriage is a success. The demons are laid to rest. Grant continues to return regularly to Bristol to see his mother, controlling carefully the circumstances of their meetings. When his mother dies they are as reconciled as they can be.

As a coda to his life as a performer, Grant encouraged and supported by Barbara, dares to “expose’ himself again, in a series of staged ‘conversations’ with his fans, “An Evening with Cary Grant”. He travels across the United States to provincial theaters telling anecdotes. He dies on the evening of one these performances, in 1986, aged 82.

This period will dominated visually by home movies from Barbara and Jennifer Grant. They show him playing, dancing, laughing with his family; in the company of the Rainiers in Monaco, with his buddies at dinner. We hear his mother declare her love for him at the end of her life in an audio recording. Barbara offers us testimony to the final happy years of his life. We will watch his touching speech as he receives an honorary Oscar in 1970, and we will hear audio from the show “An Evening With Cary Grant”.

Grant is clearly at ease with himself, no longer intent on hiding or escaping from his past. According to biographer Mark Glancy his final tour may have been inspired by his young wife, who hadn’t know him as a star. Yet, in spite of the post-LSD revelations, Cary Grant remained a very private man, and these events are performances, true to the character of a man who has always played roles and who is aware of the needs of his public, for whom he will always be more “Cary Grant” than “Archie Leach”.

©YUZU Productions 2015 14 DIRECTOR’S NOTE From the outset, we have wanted to make an original film about the life and work of Cary Grant, a film that goes beyond telling the story of a brilliant movie career and a rags-to-riches ascent to stardom, made entirely of archive clips and talking heads.

The aim is to combine Cary Grant’s own words – from his unfinished written autobiography, interviews with journalists, and audio recordings – with a small chorus of biographer (Mark Glancy), film historian (David Thomson), wives (Barbara Jaynes and Betsy Drake), his daughter Jennifer, fellow-stars (Sophia Loren, Eve Marie Saint), and lover (Maureen Donaldson) . We might also quote from the magisterial essay on Cary Grant and his acting from the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. There would be an ‘objective’ commentary voice, never to duplicate what is being said or suggested, but to set the scene, give the audience a sense of distance from the more subjective material and provide essential contextual and biographical information. There will be written materials, home movies and photographs from the family’s own personal archives.

We will quote from a careful selection of films – those which established his screen persona (as a co-star to Mae West and Marlene Dietrich,) through the glory of the screwball comedies, to the celebrated work with Hitchcock – the director who most keenly exploited the insecurity at the heart of Cary Grant’s self-invention. We will also quote from the very few films in which he broke from the icon of the suave suited hero, “None But the Lonely Heart” and “Father Goose”. The clips would serve as illustrations of the actor’s consummate craft as well as referencing the key themes in his own life.

I discovered, in the early stage of researching the project that Cary Grant had taken a series of therapeutic LSD trips in the late 1950s – with a view to gaining greater self-knowledge, finding a way out of recurring depression and improving his relationships with women. On many Saturdays when he was not shooting a film, he spent six hours with Dr Mortimer Hartman, exploring his inner world, reliving early and significant memories in great detail. He described the experience as rebirth, exposing the self that lay hidden behind the mask.

The film will show the transformation from Bristol-born Archie Leach into the Hollywood star Cary Grant, the invention of a screen persona, and the struggle to reconcile the role he had created for himself with the ever-present torment of a painful past. The journey is made possible in his therapy sessions, his unconscious and memory liberated by the powerful psychedelic. The evocation of this journey of self-discovery will provide one of the main threads of the film, an imagined re-telling of his life until mid-life, an impressionistic personal flashback rather than purely ‘factual’ chronology.

This ‘inner road movie’, narrated in Cary’s own words, will allow for an associative or poetic approach to much of the material to be included in the film: from memories of life with his parents and early street scenes of Bristol, where tall ships were moored within feet of the theatres that fed the young boy’s desire for escape; the bright lights of Broadway where he toiled for almost a decade as a third rate actor; to the imaginative use of movie clips to evocative archive of 1950s Hollywood and the American dream incarnate. All of these ‘memories’, directly personal as well as contextual, will create a kind of dynamic personal landscape, an imagined world in which Bristol’s Archie Leach transformed into the star Cary Grant. A dream-like scenario, freed from strictly linear story-telling logic, will be more true to the dramatic unfolding that the Hollywood dream factory imposed in its relentless pursuit of illusion and artifice. It feels appropriate to use the quasi-fictional technique of the flashback – so fundamental to Hollywood story-telling – as a way of exploring the invention of “Cary Grant”.

©YUZU Productions 2015 15 Although I am suggesting something freed from the constraints of objective narrative, I do not propose a clichéd ‘trippy’ series of jumbled images. I imagine the style of the LSD therapy sessions – evoked in the subtlest way of ‘reconstruction’ – with close-ups rather than wide shots, and the best possible production values of location, set, lighting and camera work. The style will sit happily alongside his contemporary 1950’s movies. There will be no “Cary Grant” impersonation, but a series close-ups, feet, hands, eyes, the glass of water used to swallow the pill, a turntable with mood music and light filtering through window-blinds.

This will be filmed with a top DoP, and well prepared. The sections of the film in which the audience would be drawn into Cary’s dream-like word of memories, flashback and free association will be set against or contrasted with a series of interventions from those who can put Cary’s inner journey into context. Judy Balaban knew Cary from 1959 until his death, and frequently drove him to and from his LSD sessions. She took the drug herself with Dr Hartman, and was a Hollywood insider. Judy will speak for the very first time in our documentary – she has been approached numerous times over the years to contribute on a wide range of Hollywood subjects but has always refused.

There will be other recurring visual leitmotivs, shot impressionistically and with a sense of drama, with the use of high contrast lighting or picture treatment, perhaps a little distorted, in close-up rather than wide angle. I am envisaging acrobats training in a pool of light, and careful tailoring gestures – measuring, pinning, the careful hands of the tailor and the feel of the cloth. These will reflect the importance of Cary Grant’s training as an acrobat – the continual transformation of the body, a kind of shape-shifting which mirrors the creation of his stage and screen persona, and his obsession with costume or disguise – the perfectly tailored suit and stylish shirts and collars, both a nod to his father’s humble work as a clothes presser in a Bristol factory, and his own desire to rise above his origins.

Our advisor is the film historian Mark Glancy who is in the middle of researching a new biography of Cary Grant. It will be one of the more considered and serious works about him, and will include much new information, which will feature in our film. We will film him working with Cary Grant’s personal papers at the Margaret Herrick Library – which will allow us to introduce the documents – letters, diaries, annotated newspaper cuttings and playbills, in Cary Grant’s hand – in a more personal way. These sequences may be shot in the manner of a Hitchcock film – with a sense of mystery and suspense reflected in camera angles and shot values and depth or shallowness of focus.

The film will be stylish and cinematic, with attention given to framing, lighting and aesthetic detail. The interviews will be dramatically lit and framed. We want to work with the same DoP throughout, to give the visual aspects of present-day material coherence, as well as a look that resonates with Grant’s 1950’s movies.

MARK KIDEL, MAY 2015

©YUZU Productions 2015 16 AUTHOR’S NOTE I knew relatively little about Cary Grant before I was approached to co-write and direct the film. I have since plunged into the material – read most of the biographies and watched many of the films in which he starred, some of them that I knew very well and others that I didn’t know at all. There is some ‘synchronicity’ perhaps in the fact that I have chosen to live in Bristol for the last 25 years and that my home and my office are within a few minutes walk from the houses in which the Leach family lived and the schools Cary attended. Bristol hasn’t changed totally, and Cary grew up close to the docks and to the theatre/circus/music hall district. I can see why the two adventures –acting and a voyage across the sea – must have become entangled in his mind and heart from a young age. I find his story remarkable in so many ways, and I am really delighted to have been asked to make a definitive and serious (as well as entertaining) film.

I have, over a long career, specialised in portraits of some of our age’s most creative people, all of them involved in the arts. I always go into the work from a position of respect and passion, and people tell me that I have an uncanny gift for getting to the essence of someone without every being prurient or sensationalist. My films are personal but I don’t put myself forward in any way: the personal touch comes from the deep engagement I bring to the subject.

Although I do not come to the subject as a fan or an expert, a film which explores Cary Grant’s journey from his humble origins as Archie Leach to his stardom in Hollywood takes me into familiar territory and will allow me to explore themes which run through many of my portraits of major cultural figures of our time and resonate with Cary Grant’s own odyssey: from the architect Norman Foster, who was able to escape from his Manchester working-class background and re- invent himself through studying in the USA to the musician Tricky, a Bristolian from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, who had grown up as Adrian Thaws, but found an identity which expressed something of his character and calling, as a brilliantly original and self-taught musician. There is a moment in “Naked and Famous” my film about Tricky, in which he is looking at a magazine cover with a photograph that makes him look like a typical black Gangsta, a mean thug. As he peers at it with a mixture of delight and disgust, he mentions that the press always like to represent him in this guise. A few minutes later, he says: “I don’t know any more if I am Adrian Thaws, the boy from Knowle West, or Tricky. It’s strange!” The questions of identity, image, self-doubt and the pressures of the public and the media’s projections are common to both.

Some of the same issues came up in my film on , who was, in his Culture Club days, forced to project a sexless and safe gay image, as a kind of “doll” as he put it. This went against his true sexual identity.

One of the things that attracted me to the Cary Grant project, already developed with great passion by Nick Ware, was the idea we would focus on the relationship between Archie Leach and “Cary Grant”, the creation of the screen persona and the tensions which this double existence and partly repressed ‘authentic’ identity created in the man. As I have discovered through my earlier films, however, the question of identity is not as simple as a dichotomy between man and mask, celebrity persona and authentic off-stage personality. We play a number of roles in life, and all of them reflect aspects of our character, which is always made of a number of ‘sub-personalities’. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have provided these complex questions with a framework which understand them better.

© YUZU Productions 2015 17 For this reason, when I discovered that Cary Grant has turned to LSD therapy in the late 1950s, with a view to getting to know himself better, and that he undertook over 60 sessions during the years just before the drug was made illegal, as a kind of psychedelic pioneer, I was immensely interested and also saw a way of exploring the question of identity in his life – the creation of the screen persona and the acknowledgement of his ‘former self’.

Back in the 1960s, I experimented with LSD and other psychedelics. A decade or so later, I participated in therapeutic groups that that used breathing and other techniques for accessing repressed emotions and unconscious memories and trauma. My life partner for the last 30 years has been a practicing psychotherapist for many years and we often talk about questions of identity and ways of obtaining increased self-knowledge. I am acutely aware of the pitfalls of such techniques – those that involve ‘mind-expanding’ drugs and those that don’t - and of the suggestibility of those who use them and the ways in which we can dupe ourselves into believing we have changed, become in some way more ‘enlightened’ or discovered more about ourselves. It is not so much that I am cynical, just cautious, and above all interested in the many ways in which we make fictions of our lives, choose particular roles or narratives and change these over the years. I will, of course, not be exploring any of this directly in this film, but I will remain at all times aware that there is, in a sense, no ‘true’ inner person behind the Cary Grant persona, and that Archie Leach is as much of a construction or a fiction as the screen idol with whom we feel so familiar.

What is remarkable about Cary Grant, however, and this has been pointed out by many who have written about him – not least film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson – is that there is a kind of uncertainty around the Cary Grant persona, an inherent instability or elusiveness, which is one of the things that makes him so fascinating.

It has become increasingly clear too for me that Cary Grant had a playful side – reflected in his taste for tumbling, slapstick, and fast-talking repartee. He was not just a ‘player’ in the sense of being a great actor, but also enjoying playing with his invented identity. He was fully aware of the artifice – he had learned his craft on the music-hall and theatre circuit, and knew what a ‘performance’ or playing roles was all about. This mercurial ability to blur role boundaries and expectations, as the man of the people with the manners of a prince, for instance, or bad boy versus savior, is part of what makes him so appealing. There is also his subtle gender- role-bending, propelled by a charm that appeals as much to men as it does to women, as he navigates a delicate dance between Yin and Yang, the seducer and the one who has to be seduced.

This essential playfulness ensures that we can make an entertaining and humourous as well as thought-provoking and surprising film. Cary Grant’s story (and persona) are never quite straight. This is what Hitchcock brilliantly realized, exploiting Cary Grant’s mixture of quicksilver charm, mystery and disturbing unease to perfection.

I sometimes wonder if I have made enough portrait films for a lifetime – but each life offers new possibilities for understanding and indeed for self-discovery as a film maker and portraitist an this is something than can undoubtedly be shared with an audience, who are always ready for another good story with a fascinating central character, who is both something of a god, and yet just like us. MARK KIDEL, MAY 2015

© YUZU Productions 2015 18 THE DIRECTOR Mark Kidel Mark Kidel is a film-maker, writer and critic specialising in the arts and music. He works mainly in France and the UK. Recent films include “The Island of 1000 Violins” (ARTE), about classical music in Taiwan, “Fabienne Verdier: Peindre l’instant” (France 5), “Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance” (BBC and ARTE), a film on Englishness with the writer Martin Amis (ARTE), “Road Movie: The Music of ” ARTE and BBC) , “Colouring Light: Brian Clarke- An Artist Apart” (BBC). His documentary portraits have included the pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, , Balthus, Bill Viola, Norman Foster, , Tricky, Derek Jarman, Boy George, and the 20th century composers Varèse and Xenakis. He has also made a number of films on African music, personal film essays on melancholia, the experience of death and loss in Paris’s Hôpital Laennec, and a ground-breaking series on architecture and symbolism (BBC2). He has written widely about music for most of the leading newspapers in the UK. He is a co- founder with of WOMAD, the festival.

THE AUTHOR AND COPRODUCER Nick Ware worked for many years at a senior level in the BBC in channels and commissioning, including as the Managing Editor of BBC Four; Creative Director of BBC Learning, and Commissioning Executive for Arts Programmes. He also was channel controller of the not-for- profit Community Channel in the UK, and channel manager of The Africa Channel. Nickis now an executive producer and media consultant. He is working with international directors on a range of films, including Sour Grapes, directed by Jerry Rothwell and Reuben Atlas (Arte/ Netflix). Nick is also International Director of the Indian Documentary Foundation, which has been set up to support documentary makers from India through training, events and capacity building. He works with documentary producers, festivals and documentary events around the world including Docs Barcelona, Docs Lisboa, Sheffield DocFest, AfricaDoc, Italian Documentary Screenings, Ex Oriente, Documentary Campus, ESODOC, EDN, StoryDoc and many others. He has worked as a tutor, mentor, session producer and moderator.

THE PRODUCER Christian Popp has since 1991 worked as a journalist and film director. From 1998-2005 he was commissioning editor for ARTE in Strasbourg and in Berlin. From 2005 to 2010 he worked as producer, author and editor in chief in Paris and Berlin for interscience film, an independent French-German production company. In 2011 he established in Berlin DOCDAYS Productions. The same year he co-founded with Fabrice Estève the Paris based productions company YUZU Productions. He produced over 30 documentaries for the international market, among them many portraits: Isabella Rosselini, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, Alfred Grosser. One of his most recent productions, “Projections of America” coproduced with ARTE tells the story of the involvment of Hollywood in the American World War II propaganda effort. Christian is mentoring and moderating at various documentary events (Sunnyside of the Docs, Thessaloniki Documentary Forum, LisbonDocs, Vision du Réel, Doc Ouest, IDFA Academy, Diagonale, i_doc).

© YUZU Productions 2015 19 YUZU Productions

YUZU Productions is a film production company created in 2012 by Fabrice Esteve and Christian Popp, two producers who have put their experience and knowledge in common to produce high quality and challeng- ing media content. They have teamed up with Ségolene Fossard, producer and CEO of Découpages, pro- duction company and press agency created in 2006.

Fabrice Esteve produces documentaries and magazines since 1994. He worked for Télé Images (1994- 1996), VM Group (1996-1999), Ampersand (1999-2004), Gédéon Programmes (2005-2007) and Docside Production (2008-2010). He has a master’s degree in cinema and audiovisual arts, a master’s degree in audiovisual law and manage- ment. He took part in the Eurodoc program in 2001. He is also a cofounder of the Science and Television as- sociation, a network of over 40 French producers working in the field of Specialist Factual, and he was over two years a member of the steering committee of the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.

Christian Popp started his career as a producer in 2005. A former commissioning editor at ARTE since 1997, he commissioned more than 30 documentaries, numerous theme evenings and live broadcasting shows. As producer for Interscience film, a French-German production company, he produced more than 20 documentaries and docudramas for the international market. He has a French-German master’s degree in History and Arts. Christian is a member of the European Documentary Network. He works as consultant and moderator for EDN, IDFA and other European institutions.

Ségolene Fossard is president of YUZU Productions, in charge of management. She is also heading the company Découpages. Ségolene graduated at Celsa in 1995. When she started working as freelance jour- nalist for television and the press. In 2001-2002, she was Associate Editor of AOL France. She then went to live in South Africa working as correspondent for radio stations and news agencies. Back in France, she founded in 2006 together with Ludovic Fossard the news agency and production company Découpages, which produces magazines, documentaries and interactive programs for TV channels as well as institution- al programs.

Yuzu is a citrus fruit native to East Asia, hybrid of mandarin and wild lemon. Zest and juice are used in Japa- nese and Korean cuisines and increasingly by Western chefs. The Yuzu fruit has a powerful aroma, its es- sential oil is used as a fragrance. The Yuzu tree is cold-hardy, and thus can be grown in regions with winters at least as low as -9°C (15°F) where most sensitive citrus would not thrive.

YUZU Productions’ ambition is to produce fresh and refreshing media content for television, the cinema screen and digital media.

Fabrice Estève Christian Popp Ségolène Fossard Producer Producer Producer Cell: +33 6 87 47 22 27 Cell : +33 6 75 67 03 11 Cell : +33 6 62 30 21 20 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

YUZU Productions 30 rue du Colonel Delorme - 93100 Montreuil - France - T +33 1 43 63 68 70 [email protected] www.yuzu-productions.com COMPLETED FILMS

INVESTIGATION / ENVIRONMENT / ECONOMY THE E-WASTE TRAGEDY Every year, up to 50 million tons of electronic waste - computers, television sets, mobile phones, household appliances - are discarded in the developed world. Since recycling is costly, around 75% of this waste ends up being shipped to countries such as India,

90’ & 52’, HD, directed by Cosima Danoritzer China or Ghana, where it is dumped illegally, polluting the environment and affecting Coproduction: Media 3.14 (Spain), CONGOO (Belgium) the lives of those forced to live with it. Mike Anane, Ghana’s most experienced environ- ARTE France, TVE, TV Catalunya, Al Jazeera, TG4, SVT, mental journalist goes on an investigation which begins in the heart of the City of Lon- RTS. Developed and produced with the support of the MEDIA Programme. don, takes us to Spain, Germany and Brussels, and ends at Agbogbloshie, one of the Distribution: ARTE Sales. largest e-waste dumps in Africa. The film will reveal how e-waste is diverted from the legal recycling circuits in Europe and sent to the Third World, using false paperwork and with many of those in the know turning a blind eye.

developed and distributed with

SPORTS / HEALTH / INVESTIGATION THE HARDER THEY FALL The sports industry is the world’s number one source of entertainment. It produces he- roes, crafts legends, and reaps billions in revenues. Yet, many athletes retire only to wake up to a life fraught with pain, anxiety, depression, and incurable diseases. When former hockey players commit suicide, middle-aged football players succumb to dementia and 90’ / 52’, HD, directed by Xavier Deleu & Yonathan Kellerman retired boxers lose their limbs to steroids, we ask ourselves: is there a life after sport? Coproduction: Découpages (France), ARTE France Have sports gone too far? Distribution: JAVA Films.

TRAVEL & ADVENTURE / HISTORY ESCAPE FROM SIBERIA During World War I, more than eight million soldiers were detained in Prisoner of War Camps. In Russia, of the 2.5 million men helt Siberian camps, 1 in 5 did not survive. Only a handful were able to escape and reach home – among them the Hungarian Lajos Petho. He escaped from Irkutsk walked for three years nearly 8,000 km in harsh and hostile 1 x 80’ 1 x 52’, HD, directed by Lou Petho & Christian Popp Coproduction: Découpages (France), DOCDAYS country to be reunited with loved ones in Budapest in 1918. 100 years on, his 52 years Productions (Germany), ARTE GEIE, Developed with old grandson Lou Petho, walks in his grandfather’s footsteps in a six months long adven- the support of the MEDIA Programme and Robert- Bosch-Foundation ture.

developed with

SCIENCE / INVESTIGATION / HISTORY THE BLOODY TRUTH How colonialism created the AIDS pandemic When did HIV originate and where? How did it become the worst pandemic of our times? In this film, three scientists from Belgium, Congo and the U.S. will find answers to these ques- 52’, HD, directed by Carl Gierstorfer tions on a journey through Congo and Cameroon where they trace the virus’ beginnings. Coproduction: DOCDAYS Productions (Germany), CONGOO (Belgium) Smithsonian Channel, CCTV Their discovery of a medical archive provides evidence how Colonialism prepared the 10, RTBF, VRT, ZDF/ARTE, S4C. grounds for the AIDS pandemic. Distribution : PBS International.

distributed with SHORT FICTION A SHARE OF THE SHADOW 4th of January 1944. The day of the opening of an important exhibition of his work, the photographer Oskar Benedek disappears without trace. Over 60 years later an investi- gations reveal the secrets of this strange story.

28’ HD. Fiction Written by Olivier Smolders & Thierry A Share of the Shadow is a film made of photographs, a bit like La Jetée by Chris Marker or Hoguelin, Directed by Olivier Smolders in collaboration Colloque de chiens by Raoul Ruiz. Almost the whole film will be told through the photo- with Jean-François Spricigo, in coproduction with graphic images made by the hungarian photographer Oskar Benedek who disappeared Les Films du Scarabée (Belgium), Wallimages, for ARTE and VOO. shortly before the end of WWII. With the support of the CNC. Distribution : Les Films du Scarabée

SHORT FICTION THE GOLDEN LEGEND Collector of cursed musicians, unreasonable murderers, fairground freaks, paranoid revolutionaries, flatulists and suicidal hermits, a psychiatric patient presents a gallery of the historic figures he is haunted by.

26’ HD. Fiction, directed by Olivier Smolders in coproduction with Les Films du Scarabée (Belgium) Distribution : Les Films du Scarabée ECONOMY / SOCIAL INTEREST DEBT MACHINE Western countries have accumulated public debt for decades. In recent years, these debts have become “exorbitant”. What do we really know about the origins of the public debts of European countries? Let’s be frank: not much. We experi- 90’, 52’, HD, directed by Laure Delesalle ence a daily storm of information that makes us oscillate between anxiety, a feeling Coproduction : ARTE France, Région Ile-de France. of overdose, anger and guilt, fear of imminent doom, and the edgy feel of being partly Distribution : ARTE Sales responsible for all this. But what is the snappy reality behind these highly subjective and blurry feelings? What is public debt about? This is what this film reveals. Financed by the region SOCIETY A LIMB APART July 1992, Jérôme is about to turn twenty. Tonight, he is back from Mont-de-Marsan street party and a dramatic car accident is going to change his life. The emergency relief ex- tracts him from the shell, he is unconscious. Joint fractures, smashed right leg and coma 52’ HD, directed by Martin Ducros,Coproduced by for two days… Maganach production, France 3 Aquitaine. with the support of Midi Pyrénées & Aquitaine region. Distribution : YUZU Productions IN PRODUCTION HISTORY / SPORTS / SOCIAL INTEREST FREE TO RUN From the streets of NYC to the trails of the Swiss Alps, from Sao Paulo to London or Paris… champions and ordinary persons… millions of people are running. Strangely, 50 years ago this activity was the exclusive privilege of an elite, only men, only in stadiums. Sports federations and Olympic 90’ & 52’, HD, directed by Pierre Morath Coproduction : Point Prod (Switzerland), EKLEKTIK authorities made the rules. Running was even considered unhealthy... The film tells (Belgium), Trilogy Films (USA), ARTE France Cinéma, the extraordinary story of the free running movement over the last 50 years featuring OFC, RTS, RTBF... Delivery: May 2015, Distribution: Jour2Fête its heroes – the stars and the anonymous, men and women who ran for freedom.

SPORTS / HEALTH / INVESTIGATION THE DOPING COMPETITION Not a single week goes by without a new doping scandal in the world of sports. Cheating has never been so frequent (positive tests went up 20% worldwide between 2012 and 2013,). But how does the doping system really work? Who designs doping programs? 90’, 52’ HD, directed by Xavier Deleu, produced by Who creates, supplies, injects enhancement drugs? What are the networks? Who pays Coproduced by Découpages, ARTE France what? How are controls thwarted? Are sports institutions complicit? Can athletes go Distribution : JAVA FILMS “Faster, Higher, Stronger” without doping? Is the fight against doping definitively lost? This film will investigate a clandestine international system.

SOCIETY KEYS IN THE POCKET Leaving the precarious life in Paris with the hope to find a better future in the country- side of Aurillac. This is the project of several families or singles through an experimental social program. This documentary follows the life of these people during one year. Will 52’ HD, directed by Stan & Edouard Zambeaux, they be able to find what they are looking for: Integrate themselves into society, rebuild produced by YUZU Productions, coproduced by Public themselves and ultimately change their life? Sénat, TVM Est Parisien, Telim. Distribution : YUZU Productions SHORT FILM / ANIMATION THE WILD BOAR A homeless orphan, an animalistic little kid escapes the big city into the darkness of the woods. It’s there that this kid meets a creature mightier than ever imagined. funded by the 11’, directed by Bella Szederkenyi, coproduced by Kabi- nett Films, La chambre aux fresques with the support of the Robert Bosch Foundation, MBB, BKM, CNC and the Poitou-Charentes region CINEMA / BIOGRAPHY / ARTS & CULTURE BECOMING CARY GRANT For the first time one of Hollywood’s greatest stars tells his own story, in his own words. From a childhood of poverty to global fame, Cary Grant, the ultimate self-made star, explores his own screen image and what it took to create it. In 1958, at the height of his success, Cary Grant is a troubled man and is one of the first 52’/90’ HD, directed by Mark Kidel, written by Mark Kidel & Nick Ware, developed with ARTE France to experiment with LSD, in an attempt of self-discovery. We travel back from that mo- Distribution : YUZU Productions ment to his poverty-stricken childhood in Bristol; his apprenticeship as an acrobat and stage actor, and making 28 films before stardom. This key period leads to the birth of the alter-ego “Cary Grant” that finally made him a star. He remained all life long hugely popular but an almost completely unknowable man. His personal demons, anxieties and frailties were kept hidden.