By Frank Worth

Cary Grant taking the floor with Kim Novak at the Oscars 1955.

Cary Grant (1904-1986), born Archibald Alec Leach, was an English film actor. With his distinctive Mid-Atlantic accent he was the ultimate, debonair leading man, handsome, witty and charming.

After success on Broadway, he came to Hollywood in 1931 and assumed the name of Cary Grant. He made over 80 films, starring in a number of comedies including The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace. Perhaps his best known screen role as a charming, unreliable but irresistible man was in The Philadelphia Story.

Cary Grant was a favourite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, notorious for disliking actors, who said that Grant was ‘the only actor I ever loved in my whole life’. He appeared in such Hitchcock classics as Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

In the mid-1950s, Grant formed his own production company, Grantley Productions, and produced a number of movies distributed by Universal, such as Operation Petticoat, Indiscreet, That Touch of Mink (co-starring Doris Day), and Father Goose.

While Grant was nominated for two Academy Awards in the 1940s, he was denied an Oscar throughout his active career as he was considered a maverick by virtue of the fact that he was the first actor to ‘go independent’, effectively bucking the old studio system which pretty much completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. Cary Grant finally received a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970.

Marilyn Pauline Novak was born in Chicago in 1933. Better known as Kim Novak, she is an American actress who was one of America's most popular movie stars in the late 1950s. She is perhaps best known for her performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).
She played Madge Owens in Picnic (1955) opposite William Holden, and won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer and for World Film Favourite. She was also nominated for the British BAFTA Film Award for Best Foreign Actress.
For her contribution to motion pictures, Kim Novak was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.