Cary Grant - Geoffrey Wansell

To millions of moviegoers around the world, Cary Grant epitomizes the glamour and the style of Hollywood in its golden years. With his dark hair and mischievous smile, he is, was and always will be one of the great stars, and in the decade since his death, the incandescence of his image on the screen has not dimmed.;Born Archie Leach, the only child of a poor tailor's presser and an unstable mother, in Bristol in 1904, Cary Grant became what the critic Pauline Kael once memorably called the "fairy tale hero". Handsome, debonair, endlessly attractive and yet never seeming to take himself seriously, he was pursued by some of the most beautiful women in the history of the cinema, among them Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.;In a career spanning 72 films, he appeared with such notable co-stars as Mae West, Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly. He was also directed by some of Hollywood's greatest directors, including Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, Stanley Donen and Frank Capra.;Grant was five times married, to a succession of beautiful women, including the heiress Barbara Hutton and the actress Dyan Cannon, and sustained a tortured relationship with money.