225 thoughts on “Cary Grant Movies”

1. JERVIS PENDELTON 3rd [Fred Astaire born 1899 speaking to close friend about Leslie Caron born 1931 in 1955’s Daddy Long Legs] “She has nicknamed me her Daddy Long Legs!”

   Disgusted FRIEND [who has been trying to discourage the relationship, played probably by actor Larry Keaton who specialised in upright circumspect status quo characters] “Daddy Sugar you mean!”

   THE MAGNIFICEN ELEVEN The romantic co-stars of Cary Grant [Born Archibald Alec Leach in 1904]. These women were all teamed with Cary in the years 1955-1966

   1/INGRID BERGMAN Born 1915 – 1958’s Indiscreet. They also co-starred in 1946’s Notorious when she was 31 and he 42 so it could be said Cary always “liked em young”! Ingrid was ELEVEN years Grant’s junior. Cary was generally well-liked and respected within the film community but Ingrid in particular was a lifelong close personal friend of his after they met.

   2/DEBORAH KERR Born 1921 – An Affair to Remember 1957 and The Grass is Greener 1960. They had also co-starred in 1953’s flop Dream Wife. She admired Grant but preferred Marlon Brando to him. Debs was SEVENTEEN years younger than Cary,

   3/DORIS DAY Born 1922. That Touch of Mink 1962. Cary was her 2nd fave actor ever but James Cagney was her 1st. She told Cary that but he said he “didn’t mind being 2nd”! She was EIGHTEEN years younger than Grant.

   4/EVA MARIE SAINT Born 1924 North by Northwest 1959. Another of Hitchcock’s screen blondes she was Brando’s girl in On the Waterfront but in N by NW she had obviously decided to trade Marlon in for “an older model”! She is still going strong aged 97 long after those two screen lovers of hers have sadly left us. Born the exact same year as Marlon but TWENTY years after Cary.

   5/AUDREY HEPBURN Born 1929 Charade 1963. TWENTY-FIVE years younger than Cary. Her real-life father Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston was a close chronological contemporary of Grant with just 4 and ½ years between them. Indeed Audrey seemed quite receptive to being serially ‘sugar-daddied’ on screen as 7 of her romantic co-stars in her heyday were aged between 11 and 30 years older than she – average difference 22.42 years.

   6/Princess GRACE KELLY Born 1929. To Catch a Thief 1955. Her real-life father, John Kelly, was just over 4 years older than Grant who was a guest at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Grace was TWENTY-FIVE years younger than Cary. In To Catch a Thief her mother was actress Jessie Joyce Landis who was to be Cary’s mother in North by Northwest even though she was just 8 years older than Grant in real life. In the screen plots, she therefore could be said to have given birth to 2 youngsters a quarter of a century apart! It is wondered wonder what Jessie thought of her movie offspring ‘brother and sister’ becoming screen lovers!

   7/LESLIE CARON Born 1931 so TWENTY-SEVEN years younger than Grant and his leading lady in 1964’s Father Goose [called Father Sugar-Goose by some more cynical reviewers!] Leslie was no stranger to the “dirty-old-man circuit” in movies as she was Astaire’s Daddy Long Legs [see lead-in above]; was the love interest of Henry Fonda, 24 years older than she, in The Man Who Understood Women; and was the wife of David Niven, 21 years older than she, in 1962’s Guns of Darkness.

   8/SUZY PARKER Born 1932 so TWENTY-EIGHT years younger than Cary. In 1957’s Kiss Them for Me she wins-out over Hollywood’s latest Blonde Bombshell Jayne Mansfield [see immediately below] for Cary’s romantic affections. Suzy too was in fact quite a hit on the ‘sugar daddy circuit’ being subsequently romanced by Gary Cooper 31 years older than she in 1959’s Ten North Frederick. Gary in turn in 1957’s Love in the Afternoon joined Grant in the cradle-snatching of Audrey [see 5/above].

   9/ JAYNE MANSFIELD Born 1933. Kiss Them for Me 1957. Her real-life father, Herbert William Palmer, was born in 1904, and was therefore precisely Grant’s age though William sadly died prematurely at the age of just 36 when Jayne was just 7; and Jayne was TWENTY-NINE years younger than Cary. “Really he’s old enough to be your father, my dear!”

   10/SOPHIA LOREN Born 1934 so THIRTY years older than Cary. She praised Grant’s comic experience for “helping her over the styles” of American comedy in 1958’s Houseboat and had been his leading lady too in 1957’s The Pride and the Passion. Still alive at the age of 87, and in fact is the only actress on the American Film Institute’s famous Legends lists still alive.

   11/Joan O’Brien. Born in 1936 and therefore the “Baby” of the Grant harem of younger co-stars in the 1955-66 period. Being THIRTY-TWO years younger than he she was less than half his age when they made 1959’s Operation Petticoat. Despite her youth she was very funny as 2nd Lieutenant Crandall in that movie and arguably a better complement to Grant’s considerable comedy skills than many a more experienced Hollywood actress might have been. Her next assignment was a supporting role in Wayne’s 1960’s The Alamo but she was not HIS love interest, being married to another in the movie, and she was the cousin of Laurence Harvey’s 3rd lead character Col William Travis.

   Overall average age difference of the 11 actresses in years younger than Cary: 23.82 years, so close to a quarter of a century.

   Reply

2. QUOTES AND EXTRACTS FROM MOVIE REVIEWS

   HARLAND GAZETTE “Gary Cooper (56) and Audrey Hepburn (28 at half his age) in Love in the Afternoon! Is this for real? Maybe Hollywood should have considered calling it the more believable Lust in the Afternoon.” Cooper was just a year and a half younger than Audrey’s father Joseph Victor Anthony Rushton in real life

   ‘OH YOU RASCALLY OLD DOG MR GABLE!’ “Quote from review of 1959’s But Not for Me by Margaret Hinxman Britain’s lead film critic who worked for Photoplay magazine in the 1950s/1960s. M-s Hinxman is referring to the fact that once again in a Hollywood movie a very young woman, actress Carroll Baker, is passionately pursuing a seriously over the hill Hollywood superstar, Clark Gable, who is over twice her age at 58 years to her 28. That doesn’t stop HER from proposing to HIM!

   The year before Gable romanced Doris Day in Teacher’s Pet. Miss Day is 21 years younger than Gable and the latter had also as his second leading lady and early-on ‘girlfriend’ in Teacher’s Pet one of Hollywood’s blonde bombshells, Mamie Van Doreen, who is 30 years Mr Gable’s junior and whose 50-year-old father, Warner Carl Olander, is in fact 7 years younger than Clark Gable. You couldn’t make it up!”

   “MY FAIR SEXY REXY!” In the 1964 screen version of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion, which is called My Fair Lady, Hollywood aborts Mr Shaw’s ending at which young Freddy Eynsford-Hill ‘gets’ Eliza Doolittle. In their musical, Hollywood gives-away Eliza instead to Professor Higgins, played by Rex Harrison, who is nicknamed Sexy Rexy in real life, and is 21 years older than Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

   SIGHT AND SOUND 1956 “Wichita is a highly-entertaining western, directed with flair by Jacques Tourneur and Joel McCrea is as usual solid at what he does best, play the stoic western hero, this time Wyatt Earp. However if one thought too deeply about it the chronological mix of the characters does stretch credibility a bit. McCrea romances and eventually marries Vera Miles, who is 24 years younger than he, and Joel therefore ends up with a father-in-law[(actor Walter Coy) who is 4 years younger than himself.

   The supporting cast is good, particularly young Peter Graves as Wyatt’s brother Morgan. Again though audiences will have to grant the chronology some poetic licence because whereas there is 21years between Graves and McCrea the real-life Morgan and Wyatt had only a 3-year age gap. In fact by the time Wyatt reached Joel McCrea’s age of 50. Morgan had been dead for 16 years as he died young from gunshot just short of his 31st birthday.

   However none of that will surely bother western fans as they watch the Earps clear out the bad guys and McCrea fade into the sunset with Vera accompanied by the voice-over of Tex Ritter singing another rousing western song, about the marshal or Wichita. Recommended: *** out of 4 stars.

   Reply

3. The following cautionary note on television movie channels at the moment for viewers wishing to buy or rent a copy of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas is perhaps an illustration of how perceptions and tolerances may have changed over the years:

   “This film contains outdated attitudes and language and cultural references which may cause offence to viewers today.”

   Certainly the clamour for television Reality shows suggests that today’s audiences wouldn’t likely buy into the traditional Hollywood classic era implication that, whatever suffering is going on globally all’s OK with the world as long as screen heroes like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper are successful in action and romance.

   Also, modern feminist writers and other women who see themselves as progressives constantly protest against sales and television repeats today of movies in which female stars when they aged were “put out to pasture” as aunts and mothers and has-been characters of all sorts in the stories.

   It is seen as double-standards that, in parallel with that, Hollywood allowed the contemporary ageing screen leading men to continue as before with fresh young female leading ladies; and healthy young male actors of those times were cast as “gooseberries” who invariably lost out romantically to the much older man, who was the bigger star.

   Arguably the most prolific example is that, from 1955 until his retirement in 1966, British-born Hollywood icon Cary Grant, often called in his later career the “Aged Charmer” or “Amorous Archibald” (his birth name} was teamed with 11 lovely leading ladies all of whom were younger than he by 11 to 32 years in real life -an average of 23.8 years younger than he.

   Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.