Cary Grant’s Family Secrets Revealed: Why He Spent Decades Running From His Childhood Pain

Cary Grant held on tightly to one cherished memory of his parents. “In our garden there were fuchsias, hollyhocks, geraniums and primroses,” he said. “We often ate under the shade of our apple tree, particularly on summer Sundays. … Those, I now appreciate, were the happiest days for the three of us.”

Elias and Elsie Leach, a young couple in working-class Bristol, England, tried to give their only son, Archie, a good life, but poverty, grief and conflict tarnished their best intentions. The unexplained disappearance of Elsie when Archie was 9 left him with fears of abandonment. He blamed his father’s alcoholism on a “slow-breaking heart, brought about by an inability to alter the circumstances of his life.” The boy would not discover all of his family’s dark secrets until he was a Hollywood star.

Cary once tried to make sense of his phobias and preferences for a reporter. He explained that the swing his father hung for him from the apple tree caused his fear of height. His dislike of Bristol’s cold winters made him try “to spend every possible moment where the sun shines warmest.” Cary’s lack of a formal education gave him an insatiable thirst for knowledge and self-improvement. “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each,” he admitted.

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Cary Grant Learned the Truth About His Mother

In 1933, one year into Cary’s first Hollywood contract, Elias called his son home to Bristol for a deathbed confession. “[Cary] had initially believed that his mother had left to go to the seaside,” the actor’s widow, Barbara Grant, tells Closer. “It wasn’t until his father was dying that he learned his father had actually put her into an institution.”

The circumstances of Elsie’s confinement remain a little mysterious. It’s been said that she suffered bouts of severe depression over the toddler death of John, an older brother Cary never knew existed. Others claimed that Elias locked up his wife because he was having an affair or because they didn’t get along. “It really isn’t clear to me how mentally ill the mother was when she was put into the asylum,” says Mark Glancy, author of Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, who read Elsie’s psychiatric evaluation. “The file says she is excitable and upset, but if one would be put into a lunatic asylum against their will, one would be excitable and upset.”

Cary had his mother released after nearly 20 years of confinement and bought her a home in England, but they never became close. She remained aloof and withdrawn from the man who had once been her little boy. “His relationship with his mother was not an easy one,” says Barbara. “He did talk very lovingly of her at times, but also quite critically.” Cary felt more affection for Elias, who had played a larger role in his boyhood, despite his remarriage when Cary was 10. “He always talked very happily about him,” Barbara says.

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In more than 70 films over four decades, Cary portrayed men of grace, humor, civility and culture, but he often felt like an impostor. Knowing the truth of his childhood did little to heal his emotional insecurity. “He’s a completely made-up character,” Cary admitted of his suave persona. “It’s a part I’ve been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant.”

Despite the cool he projected on screen, Cary sometimes trembled before the cameras started rolling. “A more nervous, fidgety actor I never saw,” Jimmy Stewart, his costar in The Philadelphia Story, recalled.

This inner turmoil also impacted Cary’s personal life. While courting his wives, he was charming and attentive, but as the relationships progressed, he grew possessive, overbearing and anxious. “For many years, it made it nearly impossible for him to have a committed, trusting, stable relationship with a woman,” Glancy says. “He always felt they were going to disappear.”

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It took a long time for Cary to understand the pattern. “I was punishing [my wives] for what [my mother] had done to me,” he admitted. “I was making the mistake of thinking each of my wives was my mother.”

In the 1950s, he entered psychotherapy and drug therapy utilizing LSD, which was legal then. Although he felt he was making progress, he admitted he might never be cured. “I got where I wanted to go — not completely, because you cut back the barnacles and find more barnacles, and you have to get these off,” he said. “In life, there is no end to getting well.”

His fourth marriage, to actress Dyan Cannon in 1965, fell victim to the same trouble as Cary’s preceding marriages, but the unconditional love he felt from their daughter, Jennifer, and his retirement from movies seemed to help him find more comfort in his own skin. “From the start, reliable as daybreak, Dad was there for me,” Jennifer gushed in her 2011 memoir, Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant. “He bared his all in love and held nothing back.”

He married his fifth wife, Barbara, in 1981. “I think the birth of Jennifer brought him great love, and I think that the relationship we had brought him peace,” says Barbara, who lost Cary in 1986 at age 82. “Most of the people that truly knew him commented that he was a much happier person in the later part of his life.”