The Joyful Collaborator – Cary Grant | The Great Acting Blog

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“Everybody would like to be Cary Grant. So would I.” – Cary Grant

 

My earliest memory of Cary Grant is in Hitchcock’s wonderful and underrated To Catch A Thief, where he played reformed jewel thief, John Robie. To Catch A Thief was the third of his four collaborations with Hitchcock, the others being Suspicion, Notorious and North By Northwest. His second with Hitchcock, Notorious, was the first of his two films with Ingrid Bergman. The other was Stanley Donen’s Indiscreet – which was itself the first of three he made with Donen. Donen’s The Grass Is Greener, was the second of Grant’s films with Deborah Kerr, the other being the proper weepy, An Affair To Remember. Grant’s five collaborations with Howard Hawks and his four with Katharine Hepburn, overlapped to produce a masterpiece of cinema, the genuinely beautiful Bringing Up Baby.

During the making of Holiday (1938), Grant and Katharine Hepburn laughed so much that they put the production behind schedule. And I think that is the key to Cary Grant, the key as to why he is such a joy to watch, the key to why other artists returned to work with him again and again: he enjoyed his work, he made choices he enjoyed, he had fun. And that is the lesson for all of us.

 

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