Cary Grant was a British-American actor. Known for his transatlantic accent, debonair demeanor, light-hearted approach to acting, and sense of comic timing, he was one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men from the 1930s until the mid-1960s.

He became attracted to theater at a young age when he visited the Bristol Hippodrome. At the age of 16, he went as a stage performer with the Pender Troupe for a tour of the US. After a series of successful performances in New York City, he decided to stay there. He established a name for himself in vaudeville in the 1920s and toured the United States before moving to Hollywood in the early 1930s.

Grant initially appeared in crime films or dramas such as Blonde Venus (1932) with Marlene Dietrich and She Done Him Wrong (1933) with Mae West, but later gained renown for his performances in romantic screwball comedies such as The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne, Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Katharine Hepburn, His Girl Friday (1940) with Rosalind Russell, and The Philadelphia Story (1940) with Hepburn and James Stewart. These pictures are frequently cited among the greatest comedy films of all time.[6] Other well-known films in which he starred in this period were the adventure Gunga Din (1939) and the dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). He also began to move into dramas such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939) with Jean Arthur, Penny Serenade (1941) again with Dunne, and None but the Lonely Heart (1944) with Ethel Barrymore; he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the latter two.

During the 1940s and 50s, Grant developed a close working relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, who cast him in four films: Suspicion (1941) opposite Joan Fontaine, Notorious (1946) opposite Ingrid Bergman, To Catch a Thief (1955) with Grace Kelly, and North by Northwest (1959) opposite James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, with Notorious and North by Northwest becoming particularly critically acclaimed. The suspense-dramas Suspicion and Notorious both involved Grant showing a darker, more ambiguous nature in his characters. Toward the end of his career, Grant was praised by critics as a romantic leading man, and he received five nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, including for Indiscreet (1958) again with Bergman, That Touch of Mink (1962) with Doris Day, and Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn. He is ed by critics for his unusually broad appeal as a handsome, suave actor who did not take himself too seriously, able to play with his own dignity in comedies without sacrificing it entirely.

Grant was married five times, three of them elopements with actresses: Virginia Cherrill (1934–1935), Betsy Drake (1949–1962), and Dyan Cannon (1965–1968). He had a daughter, Jennifer Grant, with Cannon. He retired from film acting in 1966 and pursued numerous business interests, representing cosmetics firm Fabergé and sitting on the board of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1970, he was presented with an Honorary Oscar by his friend Frank Sinatra at the 42nd Academy Awards, and he was accorded the Kennedy Center Honors in 1981. He died of a stroke on November 29, 1986, in Davenport, Iowa, aged 82. In 1999, the American Film Institute named him the second greatest male star of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, trailing only Humphrey Bogart.

One of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood, Grant owned houses in Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Palm Springs. He was immaculate in his personal grooming, and Edith Head, the renowned Hollywood costume designer, appreciated his "meticulous" attention to detail and considered him to have had the greatest fashion sense of any actor she had worked with. McCann attributed his "almost obsessive maintenance" with tanning, which deepened the older he got, to Douglas Fairbanks, who also had a major influence on his refined sense of dress. McCann notes that because Grant came from a working-class background and was not well educated, he made a particular effort over the course of his career to mix with high society and absorb their knowledge, manners and etiquette to compensate and cover it up. His image was meticulously crafted from the early days in Hollywood, where he would frequently sunbathe and avoid being photographed smoking, despite smoking two packs a day at the time. Grant quit smoking in the early 1950s through hypnotherapy. He remained health conscious, staying very trim and athletic even into his late career, though Grant itted he "never crook[ed] a finger to keep fit". He claimed that he did "everything in moderation. Except making love."

Grant lived with actor and companion Randolph (Randy) Scott off and on for 12 years. The two met early on in Grant's career in 1932 at the Paramount studio when Scott was filming Sky Bride while Grant was shooting Sinners in the Sun, and moved in together soon afterwards. While Scott's biographer Robert Nott states that there is no evidence that Grant and Scott were homosexual, it was common knowledge in Hollywood at the time that each was bisexual in behavior, before the Motion Picture Production Code and other factors made being forthright an even greater professional liability. Scotty Bowers, who knew them both, wrote, "I don't know if their wives ever knew what was going on between them." A few years before, Cary Grant had lived openly with gay Hollywood designer, Orry-Kelly." Their sexual relationship is explored in the film, Women He Undressed, about Kelly. Reportedly, because "Grant knew he needed to hide his sexuality in order to make it as an actor in Hollywood", their relationship ended. This political shift in Hollywood from general social acceptance of lesbian and gay life and relationships in the 1920s and early '30s to a more repressive and oppressive professional and cultural climate soon thereafter, including its impact on Cary and Randy, is well documented in a biography of William Haines, a homosexual actor of the era who refused to play the game of pretending to be straight. "The studio pushed [Grant] back into the arms of women... Cary had begun his pattern of frequent marriages; he'd continue to have affairs with men." Grant's daughter, Jennifer, has denied the claims. When Chevy Chase joked on television in 1980 that Grant was a "homo. What a gal!", Cary sued him for slander, and Chase was forced to retract his words. Grant became a fan of the comedians Morecambe and Wise in the 1960s, and remained friends with Eric Morecambe until his death in 1984.

Grant began experimenting with the drug LSD in the late 1950s, before it became popular. His wife at the time, Betsy Drake, displayed a keen interest in psychotherapy, and through her Grant developed a considerable knowledge of the field of psychoanalysis. Radiologist Mortimer Hartman began treating him with LSD in the late 1950s, with Grant optimistic that the treatment could make him feel better about himself and rid of all of his inner turmoil stemming from his childhood and his failed relationships. He had an estimated 100 sessions over several years. For a long time, Grant viewed the drug positively, and stated that it was the solution after many years of "searching for his peace of mind", and that for first time in his life he was "truly, deeply and honestly happy". Dyan Cannon claimed during a court hearing that he was an "apostle of LSD", and that he was still taking the drug in 1967 as part of a remedy to save their relationship. Grant later remarked that "taking LSD was an utterly foolish thing to do but I was a self-opinionated boor, hiding all kinds of layers and defences, hypocrisy and vanity. I had to get rid of them and wipe the slate clean."