Cary Grant

Cary Grant's ease on screen was a learned thing. He began as an acrobat touring Europe and America in the twenties, and he got his grace partly on vaudeville stages. Writing for Criterion, Angelica Jade Bastien says that in the comedies he undid that flawless image with his own hands, through tumbles and falls: in George Cukor's Holiday of 1938 he throws a forward somersault in a full suit and does acrobatics with Katharine Hepburn; in Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth he carries Jerry Warriner with a bewildered but mounting irritation; in Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday the same physical exuberance goes on. Devlin in Hitchcock's Notorious is the negative of all that: by the same piece, Grant turns his charm inside out there and sharpens every sentence like a knife. His own words tell of the doubleness, for he had written that he spent most of his life between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, sure of neither.