Roger Ebert on Cary Grant

Posted on August 26, 2004 by sheila

Here is Roger Ebert’s wonderful essay on Cary Grant, published after Grant died in 1986. It has a lot of good analysis on Grant’s acting, and what it was about him that was so … odd, so singular … He was a leading man, of course – he was THE leading man … but he had this crankiness to him, an independence to him, there was always something in him that was set apart from women … women had to work really hard to get in with this guy (except for maybe An Affair to Remember – but that was a different Cary Grant – a later Cary Grant, who had a different persona, more polished, more suave. His early films, though, are all about how unavailable and un-placeable this guy is – with the gorgeous face and the weird accent … where the hell did he come from? Nobody knew, and he wasn’t telling.) There’s always something in him he won’t give up, no matter how hard he falls for the girl, or how hard she falls for him.

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1 Response to Roger Ebert on Cary Grant

  1. MikeR says:
    August 26, 2004 at 6:55 pm

    It’s always easy to see the crappy aspects of one’s own life – I mean, we do have a front-row view. But it’s usually a little more difficult to see that aspect of someone else’s life – especially someone who’s rich and famous. If you think about it for very long, though, it couldn’t have been any picnic to be Cary Grant – a man playing an unbelievably demanding role even when he wasn’t onscreen.

    The public may not have known all the details of Grant’s early life, but the pain and horror and fear he undoubtedly experienced could never have been too far from him. Add to that the complex set of obligations, rights and responsibilities that came with being “Cary Grant”, and the end result would seem to be a man who did always have to be on guard, who could never completely relax and just be himself, whoever that actually was.

    He was a truly great actor. I suspect that he threw himself into his acting so forcefully because, paradoxically, he saw the work as something that was real – at least far more real than the attentions of fawning women or jealous men or the media machine. The most striking thing to me about CG has always been his active, razor-sharp intelligence that’s easily visible in all his performances. In a comparison of either intellect or acting skill between Grant and today’s leading men, most of the new guys come up seriously wanting…

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