Cary Grant’s least favourite part of being an actor: “That’s the only thing I deplore about this business”

For decades, Cary Grant was the epitome of the leading man. Suave, handsome, and witty, he was a ubiquitous presence on-screen during Hollywood’s Golden Age and was a go-to star for everyone from Howard Hawks to Alfred Hitchcock. He seemingly defied the ageing process for decades, playing opposite everyone from early screen siren Mae West to 1950s icon Audrey Hepburn.

Grant never won an Oscar, but that might have been because he always made acting look easy. Whether he was lobbing banter back and forth with Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday or stalking catlike across a rooftop in black spandex in To Catch a Thief, there was a lightness and ease to his performances that made him seem like he was hardly trying. He might not have sought out challenging roles in the same way that contemporaries like Spencer Tracy or Kirk Douglas did, but it’s no fluke that Steven Spielberg named him as one of the five greatest actors of all time.

Contrary to his persona, Grant was not the progeny of the British aristocracy or a well-heeled scion of an American tycoon. He was born into poverty in Bristol to a largely absent mother and an alcoholic father, joined a circus troupe when he was a teenager, and became a vaudeville performer in New York in the 1920s. As a relatively private person, he struggled with fame, though instead of lashing out at fans or sealing himself away in a gilded cage, he simply constructed a persona to hide behind. He once acknowledged, ruefully, that “everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

It is a testament to his appeal as a star that when he retired in the mid-1960s, while a brash new generation of filmmakers began to tear apart Old Hollywood, directors were still begging him to return to the big screen. In a conversation with Interview magazine that was released shortly after his death in 1986, the actor said that he never regretted quitting the business. If anything, he wished that he could distance himself from his fame even further.

“I don’t consider it difficult being me,” he explained, “The only thing I wish—that we all wish—is that our faces were no longer part of our appearance in public.” He hated being approached by fans in public and would refuse (politely, of course) to give autographs or respond to letters. “There’s a constant repetition of people approaching me,” he said, adding, “That’s the only thing I deplore about this particular business.”

By the time he was doing the interview, Grant had been retired for two decades and acknowledged that those fan encounters were becoming less and less frequent. When asked if there were ever any run-ins with fans he found interesting, he said simply, “The people I’d most like to meet are the least likely to come up to me.”

Luckily for Grant, he died long before the dawn of smartphones and social media and, therefore, never had to endure the modern indignity of fans shoving screens in his face everywhere he went. No doubt he would have retired much sooner had that been a part of the business when he was the face of it.

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