Leading man
BritBox miniseries Archie peeks behind the curtain of 1950s movie star Cary Grant’s life, with insight from those who knew him best. To best portray Grant, Jason Isaacs found it easiest to focus on the man behind the myth, writes
THAT voice. That tan. That effortless elegance! How do you attempt to play a man as iconic as Cary Grant?
For Jason Isaacs, who plays the famous movie star in the four-part miniseries Archie, the answer is simple. You don’t.
“I didn’t want to do it at first,” Isaacs explains of taking on the role of the debonair star of films such as To Catch a Thief, Charade and North by Northwest.
“When I heard they were doing a biopic of Cary Grant, I thought, ‘Not in a million years would I be so stupid as to step into those shoes’.
“Then, when I read the script, I saw it’s not Cary Grant.
“Cary Grant played Cary
Grant, but even he couldn’t keep it up all the time. It’s the story of Archie Leach and Archie didn’t talk like that.”
Before becoming poster boy for suave sophistication with an instantly recognisable mid-Atlantic accent, Grant grew up poor in Bristol.
His real name was Archibald Leach and his formative years were a world away from the bright lights of Hollywood.
Leach’s elder brother died in infancy. His father was an abusive alcoholic who had his mother committed to a mental institution, telling the young Leach that she’d died.
With his mother gone, Leach was sent to live with his grandmother while his father took off to start a new family with another woman.
All this – as well as the personal struggles he then faced in adulthood because of his boyhood trauma – is detailed in four-part BritBox miniseries, Archie.
The series was produced by Grant’s third wife, Dyan Cannon and his only child, Jennifer. And while Archie offers a sympathetic portrait of Grant, it doesn’t shy away from also offering some less flattering insights; particularly in relation to his strained relationship with his mother, his reliance on LSD and his turbulent marriage to Cannon, who was 33 years his junior.
Isaacs believes Grant used his charming stage persona as “a shield or an avatar” to hide the damaged reality.
While Cannon and Jennifer knew the real (and very flawed) man behind the myth, for everyone else, Grant was always putting on a carefully curated show.
“He was the very opposite of all the adjectives normally applied to him,” he says.
“On-screen he was a suave, smooth lady killer.
But in real life he was highly anxious, neurotic, troubled and belligerent. There’s a reason he had five marriages and many other broken relationships.
“So, I knew that he was a different person, but did he speak differently?”
Realising how vital Grant’s sound was to the role, Isaacs
Jason Isaacs: “Cary Grant played Cary Grant, but even he couldn’t keep it up all the time. It’s the story of Archie Leach.”
worked with a dialect coach to capture Grant’s famous stage voice as well as his authentic one.
“He was doing what he thought was an American accent but he was actually rubbish at doing accents,” Isaacs laughs.
“A couple of times he played a cockney and it sounded nothing like the real accent. If anything, he sounded Spanish. But what I was desperate to find out was what he spoke like off-screen, because I knew that he behaved differently.”
Isaacs “searched in vain” for interviews that Grant may have given that would give insight into his real voice and manner but came up short until he discovered a recording that had been made without the actor’s permission.
“In that recording I heard what his voice was really like, and it was more English, although it has some of the same familiar rhythms,” he explains.
“But he was a vaudeville entertainer when he started, and he never lost that end-ofpier showmanship even in his subtle performances.”
Most importantly, Isaacs heard “uncertainty, confusion and irritation” in the actor’s voice, which offered a glimpse beneath the façade he had so carefully created for audiences.
Spending time with Cannon and Jennifer also gave him unique insights into the real Grant.
“I talked to Jennifer a lot, but Jennifer, of course was just a kid and saw only her dad,” he shrugs.
“And that’s an interesting part of the picture, but a very small part because I know what I am like with my own children and certainly if anyone wanted to know who I was, I would ignore what they say because they just see dad.
“She adored him. He was a wonderful dad. And that’s interesting to know. But Dyan on the other hand, who most of stories are based on (her autobiography [Dear Cary:
My Life with Cary Grant] was the catalyst for this), had a terrible marriage with a very difficult man.”
Cannon was just 24 when she began dating the already twice-divorced 57-year-old Grant.
Initially charmed by the actor’s sophistication, their relationship unravelled due to his controlling personality and penchant for drugs. After an acrimonious split, the pair grew to become friends and amicably co-parent their daughter.
Grant, who had always been adamant he did not want children, became a devoted stay-at-home father to Jennifer.
Archie isn’t the first time that Isaacs has played a real person or even a real actor. He starred as Harry H. Corbett in The Curse of Steptoe about the famous British sitcom Steptoe and Son.
He has also undertaken the high-pressure job of bringing well-known literary characters to life on-screen, having played Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series and Captain Hook in the 2003 fantasy adventure Peter Pan.
Whether he’s working from fact or fiction, Isaacs doesn’t believe that one sort of role is more challenging than the next.
“The most challenging thing to play is badly written,” he smirks.
“This [playing Grant in Archie] is a very threedimensional portrait. It’s one of the great things about doing long-form television instead of movies; you get to play many sides of someone, and you don’t get to give an audience simple, spoon-fed character description.
“They actually get to watch somebody go through the good or the bad of their life and realise that no one can be summed up in a sentence.”
And that is certainly the case with the complicated man that is Archie Leach.