Artistic Drive – The Cary Grant Paradox | The Great Acting Blog

Artistic drive is essential if we are to achieve all that we need to – this post looks at the experience of Cary Grant in order to find it’s key.

 

Cary Grant was actually born as Archie Leach – a poor, crummy kid in Bristol, England. In childhood he was told that his mother had died. Twenty years later however, he learned the truth: she hadn’t died at all, his father had infact committed her to a mental institution. Further, his father left to live with another woman and Archie was consequently raised by his grandmother. It was a chilhood of grinding poverty, and he was often left to fend for himself. The shame of this grim upbringing provided him with the artistic drive to create the persona that would transform him into one of the greatest actors of all time.

He invented Cary Grant in order to escape the pain of his past. The confident, charming, elegant, witty Cary Grant was a facade to masque the nervous, tense, poor Archie Leach. He wanted his creative work to provide him with the peace of mind he could not find in his life.  But his art too would deny him this inner serenity. He kept going, kept searching, kept working, he strived for ever higher levels of artistic excellence. In the process, he became an actor of rare precision and formal rigour, constructing a body of work full of great classics, working with the finest directors and even obtaining that Holy Grail of Acting: defining an aesthetic. Only a handful of actors in history can match the grandeur of Grant’s achievement. Yet none of this gave him that peace and serenity he so craved.

What lesson can we draw from the logic of Cary Grant’s experience? He once said:

‘You cut back the barnacles and you find more barnacles, and you have to get these off.  In life, there is no end to getting well.‘

The inference is of course that there is no single point we can arrive at where everything is perfect. If there is, then it is almost certainly temporary, no more than a moment. What we are engaged in is a process that is ongoing. Most of us feel a sense of peace after a good job well done. And after a landmark work, we may even feel something inside of us fix, or perhaps a burden is lifted. For many, their creativity is a question of identity: their accomplishments add up to who they are and contribute towards who they are trying to become.

Perhaps the key to artistic drive then, is a paradox: knowing we will never find that which we crave, but to keep looking for it.

 

RELATED READING
Cary Grant And The Actor’s Individuality
Artistic Longevity – Catherine Deneuve In The Truth
Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity
Continuous Artistic Growth – The Expansive Mindset Of Ingrid Bergman
The Joyful Collaborator – Cary Grant

 

RESOURCES
Cary Grant – A Brilliant Disguise [audiobook]
Becoming Cary Grant [documentary film]

 

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