From the English circus to the heights Hollywood, Cary Grant was Hollywood’s ultimate leading man. Archie Leach was ten years old when his mother disappeared. His family said that she had gone on holiday. Later, they would tell him she had died. His father soon remarried, and Archie set out on the wandering path that would take him into the circus, across the ocean to the United States, and finally to Hollywood, where he would take the name Cary Grant. He was on the verge of stardom when he learned that his mother was still alive, and had spent two decades trapped in an English asylum—a tragedy stranger than anything Hollywood could devise.

In films like His Girl Friday and North By Northwest, Cary Grant won the nation’s heart. But off-camera, he spent his life looking for replacements for his mother. In this revealing biography, Warren G. Harris shows that no matter how debonair he was on screen, Cary Grant never escaped Archie Leach.

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