Cary Grant^†

Archie Leach ran away from Bristol at 14, joined a traveling acrobat troupe, and spent a decade doing physical comedy on stage and screen before anyone called him Cary Grant. By 1935 he'd done roughly twenty forgettable Paramount pictures. What changed things was going freelance. Without a studio picking his scripts, he chose The Awful Truth (1937), which locked in the persona: suave, self-deprecating, capable of pratfalls and one-liners in the same breath. The Hitchcock years sealed it. Nobody was asking if he was a star anymore. The question was whether anyone else could match what he'd built.

He got two Oscar nominations (Penny Serenade, 1941; None But the Lonely Heart, 1944) and lost both. The Academy corrected itself with an honorary Oscar in 1970, Frank Sinatra presenting, which is the kind of recognition that doubles as a lifetime verdict. AFI later ranked him second among Hollywood's greatest male stars, behind Bogart. The films hold up. North by Northwest and The Philadelphia Story still play repertory theaters and fill university syllabi. What made him durable wasn't the charm but the precision underneath it. He was doing something technically difficult and making it look like nothing.

Starting around 1958, he underwent roughly 100 supervised LSD sessions over four years with Beverly Hills physicians. He talked about it publicly in Good Housekeeping in 1960, at a time when most people had never heard of the drug. His article reportedly influenced Timothy Leary, then a Harvard researcher, to pursue psychedelics. The backstory matters. His mother disappeared into a mental institution when he was 9, and his family told him she'd gone on holiday. He didn't find out the truth until his early 30s. LSD, he said, helped him understand why he kept punishing the women in his life.

His wife Barbara Harris was at his side when he collapsed backstage at the Adler Theater in Davenport, Iowa, before a Q&A performance. President Ronald Reagan issued a statement saying his elegance, wit, and charm would endure. A tribute event in Monaco in 1988 drew European royalty and old Hollywood. He left $10,000 specifically to his LSD therapist, Dr. Mortimer Hartman, which says something about what he valued.