@Courtesy of BritBox
The world knew him as Cary Grant, that suave and sophisticated leading man who charmed moviegoers during the Golden Age of Hollywood. But he was born Archibald Alexander Leach in England, where he spent a Dickensian childhood beset by poverty and domestic abuse. Young Archie abhorred his upbringing so much that at the age of fifteen, believing his mother dead, he joined a vaudeville troupe as a stiltwalker, fleeing to America and vowing to be rich and successful. Despite all the outward trappings of success, the actor remained a tortured soul, forever unsure whether it was Archie Leach or Cary Grant who was calling the shots.
Archie, this exquisitely executed four-part series directed by Paul Andrew Williams, stars Jason Isaacs as the adult Cary Grant (the younger Leach is played by Dainton Anderson, then by Oaklee Pendergast and Calam Lynch). The series casts a harsh but ultimately loving eye on his persistent identity-crisis dilemma, examining the actor’s tortured Jekyll and Hyde personae. This production is no mere biopic, it is a deeply moving Bildungsroman that is ultimately redemptive, but only as Grant’s life is drawing to a close.
The framework chosen by scriptwriter Jeff Pope to tell Leach’s/Grant’s story is a series of q&a sessions with live audiences that the octogenarian Grant conducted shortly before his death in 1986. Questions from his interlocutors segue into flashbacks about his troubled childhood, his flight to America, his struggles to shed his working-class accent to make it into the “talkies,” and—most significantly—his on-again-off-again marital relationship with actress Dyan Cannon (played beautifully by Laura Aikman), the much younger woman who became his wife in the 1960s and who was the mother of Jennifer, his only daughter. (The mother-daughter duo are listed as executive producers of Archie.)
The plot’s trajectory shifts considerably when Grant is abruptly contacted by his father after many decades of estrangement. The actor is shocked to learn that his mother Elsie Leach was not dead after all, but had been committed to an insane asylum when young Archie was still a child. Incensed, Grant banishes his father on the spot and sets out to restore his mother as his psychic fulcrum. He checks her out of the asylum and installs her in a lavish home he has bought for her. The elderly woman is played admirably by Harriet Walter, who brings just the right touch of senility, battiness and maternal concern to her role.
All this was happening around the time Grant was romancing Cannon, so it’s no surprise that the actor had set himself up as one of the points in a frustrating triangle of affection involving his relationship to wife and mother. It is this dynamic that propels some of the most fraught scenes in the third and fourth episodes of the Archie series. Grant’s divided loyalties ultimately contribute to the unraveling of his marriage with Cannon, who has come to resent her husband’s control-freakish and sometimes cruel behavior, to say nothing of the eating disorders that gnaw at the edges of their relationship.
Though Grant claims to have been supremely blessed by the gift of fatherhood, it is clear that his dysfunctional relationship with his own parents has doomed any hope of a happy marriage of his own. To exorcise the ghosts of childhood, Grant experiments with LSD under the direction of his therapist, which only drives a wedge between him and his wife when she is persuaded to ingest, causing a frighteningly adverse reaction.
In an interview with y!entertainment, star Jason Isaacs describes his character as “a tortured human being with incredible scars, open wounds from his childhood that only got more and more open as he tried to make himself feel loved by getting the entire planet virtually to worship him — and feeling even more unlovable than before. Because he knew it was all fake.”
In spite of these serious challenges, Cary Grant still emerges as a most sympathetic soul. Jason Isaac seems to have that magic touch that allows Grant’s essential humanity to be reassembled from all the broken shards. Thanks to his artistic genius, viewers can finally believe wholeheartedly the actor’s swan-song line that everything is “copacetic.”
Rating: A+