Fifty years ago this week Hollywood superstar actor Cary Grant was in Bristol celebrating his 68th birthday and happily posing for the cameras at the Avon Gorge Hotel against the stunning, but overcast, backdrop of the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
This was the time of year he regularly returned to the city of his birth - but it wasn’t only so that he could visit his mother, Elsie, and treat her to a slap-up cream tea at the hotel.
From the late 1940s onwards the handsome, big-screen leading man would often be found, not only in the panto audience at the Hippodrome, but also backstage, where he would make friends with performers from the British comedy scene, according to biographer Graham McCann.
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It was the kind of clever slapstick comedy he loved and his only regret was not being able to appear in the joyful seasonal productions himself.
Comic performances on stage that Grant appreciated in Bristol over the years included Ted Ray, Freddie Frinton, Richard Hearne (Mr Pastry), George Formby, Bruce Forsyth, Morecambe and Wise and Freddie “Parrot Face” Davies, and back in California he would also champion British comedy actors who were touring the States or trying to break into the movies.
When the by-then retired Grant was in Bristol in January 1972, it was comedian Roy Hudd who was topping the bill at the Hippodrome in Dick Whittington, alongside pop heartthrob Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits fame. McCann relates how the starstruck comedian bumped into Grant in the foyer of the Clifton Hotel and was stunned to learn that the movie star not only knew his name, but was actually coming to see his performance in the panto that night.
Cary Grant had a troubled childhood, but he never forgot the place he came from. He was born Archibald Leach on January 18, 1904, at 15 Hughenden Road to Elias, a tailor's presser, and Elsie in the Horfield area and attended Bishop Road Primary School. His elder brother, John, died in infancy and his mother suffered from depression as a result.
When he was nine, his father admitted his mother to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum at Glenside Hospital, telling the boy that she had gone on a long holiday, and later that she had died. The feeling of abandonment was to haunt the five-times married actor all his life, affecting his relationships with women.
Archie’s passion for comedy and slapstick was fuelled by his trips as a young boy to the pantomime with his father. He won a scholarship to Fairfield Grammar School, but was eventually expelled. He was much more interested in hanging around the docks or backstage at the local music hall theatres, initially working the lights in the evenings at the Empire.
It was at the Hippodrome that Archie cut his showbiz teeth with the Bob Pender Stage Troupe, learning acrobatics, juggling and stilt walking. When they sailed to New York, he went with them and spent ten years as a touring performer before changing his name to Cary Grant in 1931, and catching the Hollywood attention that transformed his career.
As a good-looking, debonair leading man with a British American accent that belied his roots, he went on to make more than 70 films, including classics like North by Northwest, Arsenic and Old Lace, Notorious, Vertigo, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, The Philadelphia Story and the Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion and To Catch a Thief. Among his A-list leading ladies were Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Deborah Kerr and Katharine Hepburn.
It was when his alcoholic father died in 1935 - the same year that Grant established his movie career playing a Cockney in the film Sylvia Scarlett - that he discovered his mother Elsie was still alive and in a mental institution in Bristol.
He bought her a house in Westbury Park, where she lived until moving into a nursing home in her later years. Five-times married Grant visited Elsie regularly; in 1966 even leaving his baby daughter Jennifer with her grandmother in Bristol while he and fourth wife Dyan Cannon took a trip to London.
Cary Grant died in November 1986, aged 82 and in 2001, a statue of the actor was unveiled in Millennium Square, Bristol, to mark the 70th anniversary of his arrival in Hollywood.
Every two years the Cary Comes Home weekend festival takes place in Bristol to celebrate the actor’s roots and develop new audiences for his films. The next event is planned for November 18-20 and marks Bristol’s designation as a UNESCO City of Film.
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