Episode Details

Cary Grant was not born — he was invented. The man the world knew as the most charming, elegant, and self-assured actor in Hollywood history was born Archibald Leach in a Bristol slum, ran away to join an acrobatic troupe at thirteen, and spent the rest of his life performing a character so convincing that even he could not always tell where Archie ended and Cary began. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," he once said. "Even I want to be Cary Grant."

This episode traces the transformation from Archie Leach to Cary Grant, examining the working-class childhood, the mother institutionalized without his knowledge, the vaudeville years, and the self-invention that created the most imitated persona in movie history.

• Archie Leach's Bristol childhood and the mother he was told had died but who was secretly institutionalized
• The acrobatic troupe, the Atlantic crossing, and the vaudeville career that brought him to Hollywood
• The deliberate construction of "Cary Grant" — the accent, the wardrobe, the persona nobody could quite place
• Five marriages, the LSD therapy sessions, and the gap between the perfect image and the private man