The golden era of Hollywood is a treasure trove for those looking for inspiration for classic menswear. In a few posts ahead, we’ll draw inspiration from some of the most prominent of the male style icons – men who influence how we dress to this day. We start from perhaps the most prominent of them all, Cary Grant.
Cary Grant, or Arcibald Alexander Leach as he was actually known, was one of the foremost representatives of what is often referred to as the Golden Age of Hollywood – an era that lasted from 1910 to 1960.
There are, of course, many other outstanding actors and directors from this golden era, but few had the same star power and career length as Cary Grant. With a career that began in the early 1930s and lasted until 1966, he is one of the actors who perhaps comes most to mind in connection with classic Hollywood films.
Here we dig into the archives and bring you an interesting documentary featuring Cary Grant. In the late 1980s, this documentary was made, giving people close to him a chance to speak and tell his fascinating life story. This documentary is available in two parts below.
During his career, he collaborated mainly with two directors, mentioned Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Among the films he made with Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest (1959) is perhaps the most famous and a film that is often referred to nowadays when people want to talk about Cary Grant’s role as a style icon.
That Cary Grant was one of the great actors from the 1930s until the 1960s is not in doubt when you flip through issues of Hollywood’s Modern Screen Magazine. There are numerous articles discussing both his film roles and his personal life. Cary Grant was married 5 times and speculation about his love life was a recurring topic in the said magazine.
The picture above is from 1940 and the film His Girl Friday where Modern Screen draws attention to the fact that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russel speak at a rate of 175-250 words per minute in dialogue. According to the writer, the average was 80 words per minute in the films that had come out up to that point.
The 1940 film His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Marks, was based on the play The Front Page, which premiered in 1928. The film His Girl Friday has been in the public domain since 1968 after the film company failed to renew the rights.
Below are the two parts of the 1988 documentary The Leading Man.
