His hometown is celebrating Archie Leach's transformation into the 20th century's most charming and debonair movie star - but in real life he was more bad boy than sweetheart
'Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.' Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock
Cary Grant, Hollywood's most dry and dapper gentleman, was full of secrets. Even now, when we can easily read all about his adventures - the five wives, the gay relationships, the rows with the Academy, the chemical experimentation - it's a surprise to learn that Hitchcock's stiff-necked hero was more of a bad boy than a sweetheart. That's because his smooth appearance on screen is a seductive path to an idea of old-school movie charm, the twinkly-eyed gent in a dress shirt we'd like to clink martinis with. But deep down, the real appeal of Cary Grant is that we know he's not as conventional or as saccharine as that at all.
Over 10 days, the Cary Grant festival in Bristol celebrates the city's most elegant son. The event is billed as "Cary comes home for the weekend", and there will be screenings of some of his most famous films, in settings that resonate with the themes of the films or that were special to Grant. Notorious (1946), the Hitchcock thriller co-starring Ingrid Bergman, will be shown in a wine cellar, while Bringing Up Baby (1938), in which Grant plays a palaeontologist, will screen at Bristol City Museum. The festival will remember another local legend by showing the classic weepie An Affair to Remember (1957), in which Grant plays opposite fellow Bristolian Deborah Kerr.
By feting the man once known as Archie Leach in his own hometown, the festival also offers a chance to look into the background of this unusual movie star. There's no reason why a boy from Bristol should not become the urbane and sharply dressed epitome of Hollywood glamour, but the route he took was circuitous. And where exactly does that distinctive, strangulated accent come from?