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.
