Arguably Hollywood’s handsomest leading man, Cary Grant was a big box-office draw: tall, sophisticated, devilishly debonair in dramas, suitably wacky in screwball comedies. For more than three decades, directors paired him with the most glamorous actresses of the day. But Cary Grant didn’t know who he was. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” he said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
By all accounts, Grant made the most of his lifelong identity crisis. Lacking a certain persona—being “Nobody,” which is what Odysseus calls himself when confronting the Cyclops in The Odyssey—meant that Grant could convincingly play anybody, serious or comic: a spy in South America, a jewel thief on the Riviera, Hollywood’s idea of what Cole Porter should have looked like. He even plays a ghost, the male half of a duo of friendly spirits who set out to liberate a nowhere man from the shackles of boredom (Topper, 1937, with Constance Bennett as the ghostly spouse). He is also the aptly named title figure in 1943’s Mr. Lucky (directed by H. C. Potter), a fast-talking gambler wooing an heiress played by Laraine Day.
The following link takes you to The American Scholar website, in which this "Talking Pictures" piece went up yesterday (September 28: https://theamericanscholar.
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