The movie Alfred Hitchcock refused to make with Cary Grant: “It was impossible”
Alfred Hitchcock usually had a troubled relationship with nearly all of his actors (just ask Tippi Hedren), but with Cary Grant, he was on his best behaviour, making their collaboration not just crucial to them as individuals but to the history of filmmaking.
Hitchcock loved calling the shots from behind the camera, and Grant served as Hitchcock’s alter ego in front as a suave, handsome, and effortlessly charismatic leading man who admired the director’s artistry, making for the perfect team.
It all started with 1941’s Suspicion, where Grant got the rare chance to play a villain, then five years later, he helped Hitchcock take a bold new filmmaking direction with Notorious, before reuniting in 1955’s To Catch a Thief, which became famous for his onscreen chemistry with Grace Kelly, and finally North by Northwest, where they managed to make a piece of pure cinematic spectacle that remains one of Hitchcock’s best.
As you can tell, when it came to casting, ‘The Master of Suspense’ enjoyed working with the same actors over and over, however, there came a time after North by Northwest when the Grant and Hitchcock teamwork couldn’t cross a very materialistic hurdle.
In the early 1960s, the director was working on a script with screenwriter Evan Hunter to give Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall-set short story about a small town beset by attacking flocks of birds a Hollywood glow-up, which Hunter suggested making a screwball comedy that pivoted into a terrifying thriller.
Hitchcock immediately thought of Grant and Kelly for the lead roles, and the latter had the cool sophistication and sneaky wit that the director loved, and the former had helped shape the screwball genre with movies like Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth, making the duo a no-brainer.
Hunter wrote the script with them in mind, drawing on their chemistry in To Catch a Thief as inspiration, but unfortunately, Kelly was too busy being the actual Princess of Monaco to get involved in acting again. Taking the loss in his stride, the director decided to cast an unknown actor instead, opting for model Tippi Hedren, who turned out to be an excellent choice, but everything came crashing down again when Grant also turned out to be unavailable.
To be more precise, he was available, but only on his own terms: he didn’t just want his usual salary for the film; he wanted 50% of the entire picture. “It was impossible,” Hunter told Fresh Air in 1999, “Hitch would never give him anything like that”. Thus, as both friends stood their ground, that was the end of their collaboration.
To fill the Grant-shaped void, Rod Taylor, the Australian-born actor who boasted sharp angles (namely his jaw and shoulders) but not much else, stepped in. He might have had the sort of leading man looks that so appealed to the director, but he was severely lacking in the charisma department, so while The Birds remains one of Hitchcock’s best 1960s movies, it’s tempting to imagine just how good it could have been with Grant and Kelly as the lead characters.
