“He was apprehensive”: the director Cary Grant spent his entire career avoiding at all costs
By most accounts, Cary Grant was always a cautious, steady man.
The best example of this, aside from his status as one of Hollywood’s most notorious penny-pinchers, was that after he established the debonair, nonchalant onscreen persona that made him a star, he became extremely tactical in his career approach.
For starters, despite plying his trade in an era that favoured the Hollywood studio system, Grant never aligned himself with one studio, like so many of his peers. Those stars could find themselves locked into studio contracts that forced them to make certain films against their will. By working as a freelancer, like most actors today, Grant avoided this entirely and was free to be very choosy with the roles he accepted and the directors he worked with.
Grant’s attitude was simple: he had worked incredibly hard to develop the persona that brought him success in movies like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story, and he wasn’t about to risk that by making films he wasn’t sure about. That persona, which he often said was akin to playing himself onscreen, wasn’t actually his true self. Instead, it was the image he had chosen to adopt and that had to be protected.
“I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing,” the iconic star once mused, adding, “I played at someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.”
In truth, there was only one director Grant allowed to subvert his persona and bring out something different onscreen. He worked with the ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock on four movies: Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest. These films all mined darker depths to Grant’s laid-back charm, and allowed him to portray a moral ambiguity that simply wasn’t present in his work with other directors. While it’s not known for sure why he only trusted Hitchcock to push him into this realm, it at least seems likely that it was purely a business decision, and not personal.
Naturally, though, the fact that it wasn’t personal didn’t stop certain directors from being frustrated with Grant, including one of his best friends in Hollywood. The acclaimed filmmaker Billy Wilder tried to convince the actor to take the lead in several of his movies, but he repeatedly refused. They hadn’t ever experienced a falling out, and eventually, the frustrated director had to accept his pal was just that protective of his image.
“I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures,” Wilder told Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Billy. “He was a friend of mine, and I liked him enormously, and he liked me. But he was apprehensive; he did not want to be in new hands.” With a rueful shake of the head, he added, “I always wanted to work with him. I wanted him to play the part that Gary Cooper played in Love in the Afternoon. It would have been wonderful, right?”
For the longest time, Wilder was confused about why his friend wouldn’t star in one of his movies. The closest he got was Grant signing up for Sabrina, before dropping out at the last minute. When he asked what the problem was, the star told him not to “persist” with the offers anymore. “Look, I like you, Wilder, but I cannot explain it,” he supposedly told the bemused director, “I just…the wrong signals come up in me.”
All things considered, Wilder may have found it easier to wrap his head around Grant’s reticence if they had not seen eye to eye, or if Grant had liked him personally, yet disliked his films. That would have at least made his career-long avoidance of Wilder’s movies make some kind of sense. As it was, Grant insisted that he loved his movies, and even phoned him after Some Like It Hot‘s release to congratulate him on Tony Curtis’ performance, which was a “wonderful imitation” of Grant’s delivery. “He was very nice,” Wilder concluded, “he was absolutely great. But he was a very, very peculiar man”.
