Cary Grant And The Actor’s Individuality | The Great Acting Blog

Performance is the artistic expression of the actor’s individuality, as exemplified by Cary Grant. 

Cary  Grant was criticised for being a “conservative actor” –  there was a feeling among critics that his work stayed within the light-comedic persona that had made him so fantastically popular, rarely reaching beyond it’s boundaries to offer a surprise or two.  Actors are, after all, often judged by their so-called “range” – just think of those actors who are celebrated for being able to do various accents in a fairly convincing way, or those who do Shakespeare and television. We don’t really see this within Cary Grant’s work. He did once venture into social-realistic territory with None But The Lonely Heart, where he played a ‘cockney drifter’, but the film was not popular by Grant’s standards. And his performance was far from his best. And all of this spooked him – he was never to attempt such an experiment again. Further, there was the time he nearly did Shakespeare: he and Alfred Hitchcock had planned a silver screen version of Hamlet but they were put off by the success of Laurence Olivier’s film, and so it never happened.

Range, however, is only one way to view an actor’s output. Another way is to look at how they defined an aesthetic. Very few actors in history have achieved this but Cary Grant is certainly one of them. [Another would be Marlon Brando, whose aesthetic, ironically here, could be defined as ‘anti-Cary Grant’].  We associate Cary Grant with a specific and seminal screen persona, one which didn’t exist before him and copied since. It sprang from his imagination, from his own unique angle on the world and from his own unique nature – in short, it was the artistic expression of his individuality. Grant remained committed to this aesthetic throughout his working life, spending decades refining it, honing it, mastering it. Such a development lead to performances of rare elegance and precision, indelible works of cinema which are still admired over fifty years since his retirement from acting. Cary Grant was a true artist, one who’s individuality transcended cinema and passed into the broader culture.

Cary Grant gave something extraordinary to the world. He appeared in a classic run of films during Hollywood’s Golden Era, films which are widely watched to this day. Had Cary Grant taken a different road and been more pre-occupied with ‘range’ and experimentation, then we may never have had his screen-acting masterpieces. Imagine pictures like Notorious, Bringing Up Baby and People Will Talk without his performances at the centre of them. Maybe he could’ve experimented, maybe some of those experiments could have come off and we may have seen a glorious aspect of Cary Grant’s work that has been hidden from us, but I’d take Cary Grant in a Hitchcock picture over Cary Grant pretending to be a spaceman floating around Mars anytime.

Perhaps ‘range’ is overrated. Perhaps it’s more rewarding, more exciting and more productive for an actor to define an aesthetic. To give the world something that never existed before,  to delight in their individuality and carve out work from their own unique perception, their own unique experience, their own style, from their imagination.

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