He Became Me:Archie:The Man Who Became Cary Grant

"We all wish we were Cary Grant. Sometimes I wish I was Cary Grant" - Cary Grant

"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person. Or he became me" - Cary Grant

Cary Grant's life story is really quite extraordinary and, over four highly satisfactory and enjoyable episodes, ITVX's Archie:The Man Who Became Cary Grant (created by Jeff Pope, directed by Paul Andrew Williams) didn't even attempt to tell it all. It drilled down on Cary Grant, then Archibald Leach, and his penurious and troubled youth in Bristol and his fourth marriage to Dyan Cannon in the mid to late sixties. More than anything else, it showed the dichotomy between Archibald Leash and Cary Grant. Was Cary a role that Archie was playing? Or was Cary now more real than Archie had ever been? It seems that Cary/Archie never really solved that one.

We start with Cary (Jason Isaacs, though played as a child and younger man by, variously, Calum Lynch, Oaklee Pendergast, and Dainton Anderson) living in a huge mansion outside of Los Angeles, driving a Rolls-Royce, and making movies with the likes of Audrey Hepburn (Stella Stocker). He is rich, he is successful, and he is a very very famous actor. Perhaps the world's most famous.

But Cary Grant is a character who has been invented by Archibald Leash "in order to survive". We jump back to Bristol at the start of the last century. Archie lives with his parents and brothers in a terraced house. The family are poverty stricken, father Elias (Henry Lloyd-Hughes and then, as an older man, Peter Ellis) is an alcoholic and mother Elsie (Kara Tointon/Harriet Walter) is depressed. Archie's brother John (Ben Shorrock) died before his first birthday (though in this biopic they give him a few more years, perhaps the truth was simply too grim) and Archie is picked on and laughed at by the other kids on the street.

Once Elias has put Elsie in an asylum in Fishponds (where they chain her to the bed) he moves young Archie in with his grandmother (Shenagh Govan) who doesn't really want him. Elias then lies to Archie, quite matter of factly, that his mother has died and after traumatising him for life pretty much fucks off and leaves him to get on with it.

Salvation comes in the form of the Bob Pender Troupe's performance at the Bristol Hippodrome. Fourteen year old Archie impresses Pender (Ian Puleston-Davies) and soon joins Pender and the rest of the troupe on a trip to New York. Unlike the rest of the troupe though, Archie decides not to come back to the UK. He stays in the US and makes his way to Hollywood.

To begin with he struggles to catch a break but Mae West (Lolly Jones), of all people, spots him and recognises his potential to be a sex symbol. In fact it is he she delivers THAT famous line to. Once he's in the door there's nothing stopping him and soon he's making films with the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine and leading a life of pool parties, beach houses, open top sports cars. His name, quite literally, is up in lights. He buys a mansion and he employs a maid.

He also becomes friends with (and, in many instances has dalliances with) the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day (Alexandra Guelff), Fay Wray (Teddy Thomas), and Grace Kelly (Lily Travers). But the focus of this series is Grant's fourth  marriage to Dyan Cannon (Laura Aikman). Not least because it's based on Cannon's book.

Grant was thirty-three years older than Cannon. She wanted kids and he didn't. He'd just come through his third divorce. It didn't seem like an obvious match on paper but Grant was very insistent. He did so much 'pursuing' that some would call it stalking. We see Grant and Cannon meeting, we see them falling in love, we see them splitting up, we see them getting back together, and we see them getting married (they play Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March which seems like a lost opportunity when there are perfectly good songs out there specifically about Cary Grant's Wedding).

Grant impresses Cannon by inviting her to meet Alfred (Ian McNiece) and Alma Hitchock (Niamh Cusack) - he's filming North By Northwest - but he's also controlling, pernickety, and very patronising (calling her 'child'). He has commitment issues and he's sometimes short tempered which isn't the image he wants to project of 'Cary Grant'. The contrast between the dark grimy streets of Bristol at the turn of the 20th century and the bright pastel colours, green lawns, and blue skies of southern California is as pronounced as the contrast between Cary Grant the public figure and Cary Grant/Archibald Leash the private, and troubled, individual.

With a soundtrack of The Searchers, The Ventures, Primal Scream (!), Bruce Channel's Hey Baby, and Elton Motello's Jet Boy Jet Girl we see Grant turn down the chance to be the first James Bond, choose his new name (from a telephone directory), and taking LSD under the supervision of Dr Hartman (John Moraitis). We see him sat in his garden with his agent Stanley Fox (Jason Watkins/Rob Malone). We see him as a young man hanging out with George Burns (Christian Lees) and we see him as an octogenarian, in 1986, wooing an auditorium full of admirers with his anecdotes and charm.

That charm stays 'til the end but by 1986 Grant's health was deteriorating, the doctors order him to slow down but Grant believes "the show must go on". There are several moving scenes. When Grant finds out, decades later, that his mother is still alive and, even more so, when he goes to visit her in the asylum in Fishponds. He's not just confronting his parents, he's confronting his past, and he's confronting the reality of his life. Behind the mask, underneath the facade, it seems as if Cary Grant/Archibald Leach remained, at heart, the vulnerable child he always was. No amount of fame, no amount of LSD, and no amount of beautiful women could ever really change that. If even Cary Grant can't be Cary Grant then what hope for the rest of us?