Cary Grant was the first movie star to go free-lance in 1936/7. From the time his Paramount Pictures Corporation contract ended in 1936, Grant never again signed exclusively with any studio. Unlike any other film star, at least until the early 1950s, he himself picked the scripts and the directors he cared to work with. No executive assigned him to pictures; he was not forced to do anything he didn’t want to. Grant was responsible for his material, determined the arc of his own career and shaped his movie persona through his own choices. Other actors, men like Bogart, Cagney, Tracy or Cooper were not as free in those entre deux guerres and WW 2 and early post-WW2 years. Grant’s unique acting characteristics first began to be seen during these years. Until then, he was little more than a likeable, slightly awkward, perhaps too good-looking, and fairly conventional leading man in a string of largely forgettable pictures. If some remember him opposite Mae West in She Done Him Wrong or Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, it is because he is so surprisingly unlike the Cary Grant that was to evolve. So writes Peter Bogdanovich in his article “Cary Grant,” at CliveJames.com.

By 1938 the name Cary Grant became synonymous with a certain character: a kind of cockney brashness combined with impeccable taste and a detached and subtle wit. What made him so desirable as a player and so inimitable was a striking mixture of talents and matinee idol looks. He became such an accomplished master at comedy, both high and low, that his dramatic talents have been generally overlooked. Given the right script and even an indifferent director, Grant’s personality could transform a film like Mr. Lucky into something altogether memorable and affecting. When all the elements were right, his presence became an indispensable part of masterpieces like: Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings and Girl Friday as well as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Notorious.

The ideal leading man, the perfect zany, the most admirable dandy and the most charming rogue: except perhaps in his earliest years at Paramount, he was never allowed to die at the end of a film and with good reason: who would believe it? Cary Grant was indestructible.-Ron Price with thanks to Peter Bogdanovich in his article “Cary Grant,” at CliveJames.com.

You were on your own as those
first Plans came into being in ’36;
you had gone free-lance as the 1st
Bahá'í teaching Plan came into
being back in the 1930s and as
Ronald Colman continued his
career and gave my mother the
reason to call me Ronald Price.

Ron Price
20 December 2009

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married for 43 years, a teacher for 35, a writer and editor for 10 and a Baha'i for 51