So many movie stars struggle to live up to the screen persona that made them famous, but for one of the greatest leading men in Hollywood history, that contrast was unusually acute. Cary Grant was not just a name that Archie Leach adopted to sell himself as an actor; he was a character Leach played for decades on and off screen, in a futile attempt to become someone else.
Archie, an emotive four-part bio-drama, follows its subject through no fewer than five phases of his life. Dainton Anderson is Archie the young boy, growing up in Bristol in the 1910s, in grim poverty made even harsher by the feckless cowardice of his father, Elias (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who is depicted as partly responsible for the death of Archie’s elder brother. His mother never recovers from the loss: a pulverising scene with Kara Tointon as Elsie Leach, filmed from above to mimic the young Archie watching her from the top of the stairs, sees her scrubbing the living-room floor in semi-darkness before suddenly stopping, throwing her head back and screaming. The tragedy becomes a defining moment when the conniving Elias has the grieving but not unstable Elsie committed to an asylum, lying to Archie that his mother is dead.
