Jason Isaacs takes on the life of Cary Grant in the new drama, Archie: here’s our review of the show.
In 2021, podcaster and writer Adam Roche released, as part of his meticulously researched The Secret History of Hollywood, a huge three-part series simply titled ‘Cary’. No other descriptor for perhaps anyone over the age of, generously, thirty-five and with an interest in film was necessary. We knew who he meant.
Cary Grant remains arguably one of the greatest Hollywood icons of the 20th century. He died when I was just four years old, so my life barely overlapped with his. By the mid-1980s, Cary hadn’t made a picture in 20 years and was firmly ingrained on the talk circuit, performing to willing audiences, telling anecdotes and recounting memories. His last movie was a comedy for director Charles Walters called Walk Don’t Run, three years after what most would consider his last memorable film – Stanley Donen’s Charade, where he starred alongside another icon, Audrey Hepburn.
Later in Archie, the dramatisation of his life, we witness Cary filming alongside Audrey, yet another star whose first name remains to this day somewhat synonymous with her persona. Marilyn would be another.
Those two women typify something Cary also was granted – star power. People in the 2020s buy wall paintings or cushion covers with Marilyn and Audrey’s faces, the latter smoking as we saw in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The same isn’t quite true of Cary but nevertheless, symbols remain a shorthand to identify him with.
Picture Cary in your mind and what do you see? The smart suit? The slick hair, black in youth, grey or even white in older age? A smooth, charming persona, reflected in comedies and dramas from the 1930s onwards where he was the consummate swooning bachelor. There is a reason George Clooney is often likened to him in the modern day – they share a similar, casual, debonaire sense of style Cary grew into even more with age. The man, the look, has probably outgrown many of the films he made, and the historical truth about the man. Truths that Archie attempts to grapple with.
Across four episodes, the Jeff Pope-penned series, directed by Paul Andrew Williams, works to cover the fact around the fiction and understands the power of the icon, and the name.
Pope doesn’t call it ‘Cary’ for a reason. Archie Leach was the name he was born with in 1904, in the port city of Bristol just after the passing of the Victorian age. By the time he comes of age into poverty just before World War I, with a brother who dies in childhood, a mother committed to a sanitarium by a cold and selfish father, young Archie could be a Dickensian creation. Effectively an orphan who finds kinship in a travelling troupe of performers and decides to make it as a star in the burgeoning landscape of Hollywood.
This is the myth behind the legend of Cary.
One of the reasons he has been adopted over the years as one of Bristol’s greatest exports, to a degree you can even visit a statue of him in the city’s Millennium Square (as my local big city, I have made this pilgrimage). Indeed, why his name has entered cinematic legend alongside the other original monikers of famous screen icons, such as Maurice Micklewhite or Norma Jean Mortenson. John Cleese even named his hapless, foppish romantic hero in A Fish Called Wanda, made in the shadow of Cary’s death, Archie Leach. The filmmakers seem acutely aware of the importance in Cary’s original name, and the schism between the man and the act.
Cary discusses, much later in life, just how much ‘Cary Grant’ was a persona he played, as part of his mission to make it as a star, to escape the hard life his parents experienced. It is a rags to riches tale but it also encapsulates the story of Hollywood, plucking as it did bright and beautiful young things and throwing them into the limelight, tethering them to contracts and studios before the system imploded just after Cary Grant stopped being a film star. That seems key. He typifies the studio product who didn’t burn out, fall away, collapse into oblivion. By the 1960s, he is enough of an icon that he can wave away the chance of playing James Bond in Dr. No when it crosses his path. The world needs him, not the reverse.
This is the man essayed by Jason Isaacs, just one of several actors to portray Cary across the span of his life, but who plays him as the adult film star, older gent and emeritus legend, all with the help of prosthetics and make up.
Isaacs himself has natural star charisma, albeit one he has moulded as strongly into that of a character actor across his career, giving him a chameleonic quality, and it makes him a surprisingly natural fit for the Cary he portrays in the main – a middle-aged, rather lonely figure who courts the much younger, beautiful rising star Dyan Cannon (Laura Aikman, who has an incredible likeness to the real woman), having a daughter with her late in life and a marriage (one of four) that Archie positions as the most important relationship of his life.
Quite whether you agree, and certainly Cary scholars will, is open to question. Grant had marriages before and after Dyan that lasted longer. The show airbrushes out Barbara, his wife during the 80s up to his death. Dyan and their daughter Jennifer were heavily involved in production of the series, and Isaacs talked to them extensively, as he told Empire: “I’ve always found that you never get a fuller picture of someone than by talking to the people who love them, or who had their hearts broken by them.” This focused lens, perhaps inevitably, leads to the exclusion of other aspects of Archie and Cary’s lives that fans or historians might wish to see covered, but Pope looks for the emotional truth at the heart of the Cary legend. This is a logical approach.
The result is nonetheless fractured, even if Williams’ direction is solid and for an ITV backed production, this has production value – the look and feel of old Hollywood glamour is in evidence.
It reminded me of Nolly, Russell T. Davies’ recent drama about Noele Gordon and Crossroads which while well written, seemed to string out drama and plot that wasn’t really there. Archie has the opposite problem – there’s plenty to say but Pope’s attempt to cut across multiple time zones doesn’t entirely work, keeping a framing device of Cary at the end of his life almost using Q&A’s he’s advised by doctors not to continue doing as a means of communicating his story. It becomes challenging to entirely get a grip on that emotional core Archie is looking to find.
There is plenty to like here, having said that. Isaacs is impressive working to nail Cary’s unique brogue, a combination of clipped British diction and learned, louche American smooth, and he captures the man’s gait and posture well. Actors always run the risk of caricature in biopics such as this, but he avoids it. Film fans will enjoy such treasures as Alfred Hitchcock (played, of course, by Ian McNeice) filming North by Northwest with him, the appearance of the aforementioned Hepburn etc… and many will no doubt learn plenty about Cary Grant they didn’t know before.
I do wonder though, with an almost 60 year gap between now and Cary Grant as a cinematic icon, how many people will truly find Archie a story they want to know. Cary has passed into the statuesque impressions of an age almost impossible for anyone to imagine now, the first round of Hollywood’s cultural effect. There is no doubt, however, that Cary Grant is one of the biggest stars in movie history, and will always remain so, even if the world has changed.
Archie will help you see beyond the icon, if that is a journey you wish to take. In a way, I’m not sure you need to.
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