Cary Grant

Archibald Leach left Bristol at 16 with a vaudeville troupe, running from an impoverished home, an alcoholic father, and a mother who wasn't there. He worked the American stage through the 1920s, then landed in Hollywood in the early 1930s and remade himself entirely. Crime films and dramas came first - Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong - but the screwball comedies made him: The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, pictures that still define the genre. He took on Hitchcock four times between 1941 and 1959, playing darker, morally ambiguous men in Suspicion and Notorious, then the elegance of To Catch a Thief and the everyman-in-danger of North by Northwest. Two Oscar nominations, never a win; an Honorary Award in 1970. He married five times, had one daughter with Dyan Cannon, and walked away from acting in 1966 to sell perfume and sit on corporate boards. He died of a stroke in 1986, twenty years gone from the screen but still the measure of what a leading man was supposed to look like.