Cary Grant

Graham McCann’s Cary Grant is a biography of Cary Grant, published in 1996 by Columbia University Press. Google Books lists it under a longer title, Cary Grant: A Class Apart. Open Library files it under biography and under motion picture actors and actresses, and its description says the book examines the ambiguities in Grant’s life and work.

The catalog lists 15 books on Grant, all classed as biographies. Ten came out before McCann’s, from Lionel Godfrey’s Cary Grant (1981) to Nancy Nelson’s Evenings with Cary Grant (1991). One shares its year, Geoffrey Wansell’s Cary Grant, dark angel (1996, Arcade), and Wansell’s other two listed titles date from 1983 and 1984. Three came later: Marc Eliot’s biography (2004), Dyan Cannon’s Dear Cary (2011) and Scott Eyman’s Cary Grant (2020). McCann’s is the only one of the 15 from a publisher with “University” in its name.

For fans

What the library records say

The two records disagree on length: Open Library gives 346 pages and Google Books gives 380. Open Library prints the book’s first sentence as “Cary Grant was a working-class invention.” Its description, which mostly spells the name “Gary Grant,” calls him “Hollywood’s quintessential democratic gentleman” and counts a star career of over 30 years across more than 70 movies.

That description names three contrasts as the book’s subject: an English working-class man playing a well-bred American, a playful entertainer turned powerful businessman, and an “intimate stranger” who was often “the seduced male.” It quotes Grant himself, “There are always ambiguities,” and it describes the book as “thorough” and “meticulously researched.” The Open Library record quotes no outside review.

McCann in Wikipedia’s account of Grant

Wikipedia’s article on Grant calls McCann his biographer and reports several judgments under McCann’s name, though those passages name the author and not a particular title. McCann is credited with the view that Grant’s mother could neither give affection nor accept it. He is reported as saying that Grant spoke his lines in the 1931 short Singapore Sue “without any conviction,” and as ranking The Howards of Virginia as Grant’s worst film and performance.

The article also has McCann attributing Grant’s “almost obsessive maintenance” of a tan to Douglas Fairbanks. It reports his note that Grant, from a working-class background and not well educated, worked throughout his career to move among high society and pick up its manners. McCann’s verdict, as Wikipedia quotes it, is that Grant was “the funniest actor cinema has ever produced.”