The director Cary Grant swore he’d never work with again: “I’m either broke or lost my mind”
Cary Grant wasn’t easy to piss off. He had a reputation for being cool, calm, and effortlessly debonair, and while he could never live up to the impossible bar set by his on-screen persona, he spent his entire adult life doing his darndest to get close. By all accounts, he was a charming man in person — friendly with fans, not handsy with co-stars (the bar was pretty low back then), and not prone to fits of diva behaviour on-set.
He had ample opportunity to lose his cool. After all, he worked with some pretty notorious directors. Unlike many people who worked with Alfred Hitchcock (most of them, admittedly, women), Grant had nothing but good things to say about the ‘Master of Suspense’. He worked with him multiple times over more than a decade and called him his favourite director of all time. While some stars accused Hitchcock of being cruel and downright predatory, Grant remembered him as “very calm and patient”.
The actor’s tolerance for difficult directors must have been pretty high, but even he couldn’t stand one of the most personally reviled and critically acclaimed filmmakers of his age. Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian-born director who made some of the most celebrated films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, and a little wartime love story called Casablanca. In addition to movies, he made enemies.
James Cagney admitted that Curtiz could make a good movie but called him “a pompous bastard who didn’t know how to treat actors.” Peter Lorre glumly observed that the director “eats pictures and excretes pictures.” And Errol Flynn, who appeared in several swashbuckling films directed by Curtiz, said that he “liked blood so much that he insisted the protective tips be taken off the swords.”
Curtiz’s biographer, Alan Rode, stated that it all came down to his passion for the job, saying that the director’s “demonic work ethic approached savagery.” He couldn’t stand actors who took lunch breaks and, according to Lauren Bacall in her memoir, pined for stars who would work seven days a week.
Grant had a typical Curtiz experience when he made the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day. He had been on a hiatus from acting for nearly a year and took to the challenge of making a quasi-musical with extreme perfectionism. That could have made him the perfect fit for the taskmaster Curtiz, but instead, they butted heads. Surprisingly enough, it was Grant who seemed to harbour all the rancour. Maybe Curtiz admired his work ethic. As the actor dug deeper into his character and made demands about wardrobe and dialogue, Curtiz may have seen him as a kindred spirit.
Any respect he might have had was one-sided. By the end of the production, Grant was so fed up with the whole thing that he did something highly out of character. He marched up to Curtiz in front of the cast and crew and said, “If I’m chump enough ever to be caught working for you again, you’ll know I’m either broke or I’ve lost my mind.” He never did.
