Photo: BBC/BritBox
Jason Isaacs in Archie
Jason Isaacs as Cary Grant in ‘Archie’
Cary Grant was one of the most distinctive actors during the studio system’s golden age. But the boy, born in Bristol, England, with the unpromising name of Archibald Leach, traveled a long way before becoming the familiar star of Charade and North by Northwest.
The new series, “Archie,” streaming on Britbox, explores the star’s ascent from English poverty to worldwide celebrity. The story cycles between time frames—a chronology of his youth, his 1961 encounter with future wife Dyan Cannon and his 1986 speaking tour shortly before his death.
Casting counts for two-thirds in a project like this and the job was well done. British director Paul Andrew Williams chose Jason Isaacs, an actor able to look, behave and speak similarly to Grant in his older years. Laura Aikman is a dead ringer for Dyan Cannon, the fourth of Grant’s five wives and the focus of “Archie.” The British cast includes many faces familiar to Britbox fans, including Ian McNeice (from “Doc Martin”) as Alfred Hitchcock.
Isaacs maintains Grant’s unextinguishable glow, his charm and easy wit, off camera and on—until his image cracks against the blows dealt by reality. Part of “Archie’s” story, the early years, concerns a brave boy who escapes from a Dickensian dead end. After bearing responsibility for his other son’s death, young Archibald’s self-absorbed father commits the boy’s mother to an asylum and deposits him with grim relatives. As a teenager he toured Britain’s vaudeville circuit and when the troupe performed in New York, he stayed on, trying his luck in the New World.
The young man who became the flawlessly debonaire star has holes his socks and sleeps in a tenement room, weeks behind on rent. He invents Cary Grant as a character, and fashions that voice, an unplaceable accent emanating from the mid-Atlantic, as a means of survival. He eventually becomes the mask he wears, but the mask threatens to slip when, in emotionally trying moments, he confronts the fact that he inherited some of his father’s lack of empathy.
Film buffs will enjoy the reenactments of distinctive scenes from Charade(with Stella Stocker as Audrey Hepburn) and North by Northwest (ducking the crop duster in a studio cornfield). And then there is Grant’s LSD session, presided over by his psychiatrist (the psychedelic was legal and used in therapy until 1966). Grant’s trip was pleasant; Cannon’s was wracked by anxiety.
“Archie’s” screenwriter, Britain’s Jeff Pope, drew the story from interviews with Cannon and the daughter she had with Cary, Jennifer Grant. “Archie” condenses a complicated life and long career into four episodes of an hour each, necessarily editing events real and supposed into a compact coherent narrative. It’s the story as told by Cannon and her daughter, as probably told them by Grant—a selective set of reminiscences that adheres to the known events of his life and casts light from a certain angle.
