Archie in the Big Apple: Mapping Cary Grant’s transformative New York years

Crofts, Charlotte

Abstract

This paper explores how the Cary Comes Home festival seeks to engage Cary Grant fans in a sense of pilgrimage to the places of significance in his life, and in his movies. Most often imagined as an American, Cary Grant was born as Archibald Leach in Horfield, Bristol in 1904. The paper will first outline the Bristol-based festival’s history and aims, focusing on strategies employed in raising awareness of and developing an audience for Cary Grant in Bristol, a strategy which has drawn visitors from as far as Australia and the United States (including a super-fan from Minneapolis who attended for the third time in 2018).

It will then briefly explore how Bristol locations have been mapped in the Looking for Archie walking tour, which retraces Archie’s hometown haunts, and uncovers Bristol’s hidden cinema history, in the places where it actually happened, situating this within the wider context of cinematic tourism, fan practices and communitas.

The festival is heading to New York in 2020 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Archie Leach emigrating to New York on the RMS Olympic (the Titanic’s sister ship). He spent 12 years in New York before driving out west in a yellow Packard in 1931 to find his fortune in Hollywood. It is where he worked his way up from vaudeville to musical theatre, mixed with the Algonquin set and developed what was to become his urbane screen persona. Furthermore, many of his films are set in New York, including two of his most iconic roles, An Affair to Remember (immortalised by Nora Ephron in Sleepless in Seattle) and North by Northwest.

The paper maps the significance of New York in Cary Grant’s astonishing journey of self-invention from Bristol-boy Archie Leach, son of a tailor’s presser, to fashion icon voted best-dressed man in Hollywood by GQ Magazine, whose image continues to circulate on the internet, from fan Facebook pages to memes moaning about the state of men’s couture.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Fan Studies Network 2019 Conference
• Start Date: Jun 28, 2019
• End Date: Jun 29, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 5, 2023
• Keywords: Cary Grant, Cinematic Tourism; Fan Pilgrimages; New York
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10289866
• Related Public URLs: https://fanstudies.org/2019/02/01/fan-studies-network-2019-conference-portsmouth-uk-28-29-june-2019/