Cary Grant

Born Archie Leach in Bristol in 1904, Cary Grant left the city at just fourteen with an acrobatic troupe, eventually reinventing himself as one of Hollywood’s most enigmatic and enduring stars. His life and screen persona offer a rich case study in performance, masculinity, class, migration, and self‑invention — and in the creative labour involved in becoming “Cary Grant.”

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, until finally I became that person.

Or he became me.”

— Cary Grant

My research explores Grant’s star identity through film analysis, archival research, videographic criticism, festival curation, and creative practice. I’m particularly interested in how his carefully constructed persona both conceals and reveals broader cultural anxieties around authenticity, belonging, class mobility, and aspiration.

From Lost Cinemas to Cary Comes Home

My work on Cary Grant began through locative media and cinema heritage, rather than conventional star studies. While developing the mobile app Lost Cinemas of Castle Park, I encountered Grant’s own reflections on childhood cinema‑going in Bristol — trips with his parents to local picture houses, and a formative school visit to the Bristol Hippodrome. These early encounters with popular performance offered a vital lens on Grant’s later fascination with movement, display, confidence, and control.

That research directly led to Cary Comes Home, a biennial festival reconnecting Grant’s Hollywood career to his Bristol origins through screenings, talks, walks, and public events. The festival explores how film heritage can live actively within a contemporary city, rather than remaining sealed in archives or nostalgia.

Festival curation has included themed editions on class, Cary Grant as acrobat, and journeys, tracing the movement from Archie Leach to global icon. Underpinning all of them is a question that continues to drive my work: what does Cary Grant symbolise as a working‑class Bristolian who reinvented himself through performance, discipline, and the Hollywood star system — and how might that story resonate today?

Videographic Work and Stardom

Festival curation feeds directly back into my videographic and creative exploration of Grant and stardom. I use videographic methods to think with the moving image — allowing rhythm, montage, gesture, and repetition to generate critical insights into star performance. My videographic work on Grant includes a BBC Inside Cinema Short: Cary Grant — a concise audiovisual exploration of Grant’s screen presence and cultural legacy; an entry on "Charm" for the Tecmerin Screen Stars Dictionary, exploding the straight-forward reading of Cary Grant as debonair, sophisticated and sauave by foregrounding his slapstick, screwball and comedic prowess; and Love Affairs to Remember, examining repetition, romantic performance, and emotional labour across 4 remakes of Love Affair/ An Affair to Remember. I’m particularly interested in videographic criticism as a way of thinking through performance with performance — allowing the moving image to generate knowledge about stardom rather than simply illustrating it. This work has been presented in academic and creative contexts, including conference screenings and curated programmes, where it sits productively between scholarship and audiovisual essay.

Variations of Roger (Work in Progress)

My current videographic project, Variations of Roger, is a work in progress, with its first iteration presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference. The video essay imagines Cary Grant’s recurring “Roger” characters as variations of a single unstable masculine identity. It speculatively asks: what if Roger Adams (Penny Serenade) and Roger O. Thornhill (North by Northwest) are imagined as the same man moving across different genres, eras, and emotional registers? By placing the thriller and the melodrama in dialogue, it reveals how Grant’s star persona performs masculinity as fluid and unstable, shaped by ambition, vulnerability, romance, and fatherhood, rather than a fixed persona.. Through videographic juxtaposition, the project offers a fresh way of seeing Cary Grant’s versatility, emotional depth, and enduring cultural power, building directly on my interest in stardom as something repeatedly performed, revised, and rebuilt over time..

When Cary Met Angie (in development)

My forthcoming project When Cary Met Angie brings my two enduring research crushes — Cary Grant and Angela Carter — into direct dialogue. The project explores shared concerns around performance, self‑invention, voice, class mobility, and the stories we tell to survive and transform ourselves. Although working in very different cultural registers, both Grant and Carter were acutely aware of identity as something shaped by narrative, media, and performance. This project uses immersive live performance to think across cinema, literature, and popular culture — asking what happens when Carter’s critical insights into performance, myth, and power are brought into conversation with Grant’s star image and reinvention.

Why Cary Grant, Now?

At the heart of my work on Grant is a forward‑looking question: how might Cary Grant’s journey speak to young people growing up in Bristol today? As a figure shaped by working‑class origins, popular performance, and global media systems, Grant offers a powerful — if complex — model of aspiration. Through apps, festivals, films, and videographic essays, my work asks how cinema heritage can inspire not through nostalgia alone, but by opening up conversations about class, creativity, belonging, and becoming.

Selected Publications & Video Essays

Videographic & Broadcast Work

Crofts, Charlotte. Inside Cinema Shorts: Cary Grant. BBC iPlayer, 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b4gqx0/inside-cinema-shorts-80-cary-grant

Crofts, Charlotte. “Bristol Fashion: Reclaiming Cary Grant for Bristol – Film Heritage, Screen Tourism and Curating the Cary Comes Home Festival.” Open Screens, 2021. https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/8018/ 

Crofts, Charlotte. “Walking in Cary Grant’s Footsteps: The Looking for Archie Walking Tour.” In Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes, 1st ed., 23–? London: Routledge, 2022.

Crofts, Charlotte. “Screen Stars Dictionary: Cary Grant” Journal of Audiovisual Essays (Tecmerin), Issue 13 (June 2024). https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/screen-stars-dictionary/

Crofts, Charlotte. Love Affairs to Remember. Videographic essay featured in Screen Studies Conference 2025. https://screenstudiesconference.com/programme-audio-visual-essays-curator-and-creator-autobiographies/