Over the course of a screen career that spanned more than thirty years, Cary Grant made seventy-two feature films and established a reputation as one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars. His image as an urbane, debonair man-about-town appealed to audiences across many decades, and he remains an icon of sophistication and elegance to twenty-first-century movie fans. In 1975, nearly ten years after Grant's retirement from movies, film critic Pauline Kael wrote a lengthy and admiring essay on him for the New Yorker. ‘[T]he man from dream city’, in her assessment represented, ‘a subtle fantasy of worldly grace … so gallant and gentlemanly and charming that every woman longed to be his date’ and ‘men wanted to be him’. Another prominent critic, David Thomson, simultaneously declared Grant to have been ‘the best and most important actor in the history of cinema’. Praise of this order was particularly remarkable given the widespread assumption during the years that Grant was active in films that he simply ‘played himself’ on screen. This helps to explain why he never won the Academy Award for ‘best actor’, and only received an ‘honorary’ Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in retirement in 1970. Since then, Grant has been the subject of more than a dozen biographies, many scholarly studies and innumerable film seasons, retrospectives and DVD ‘boxed sets’. The continuing interest in him and praise for his performances mark him as one of the most admired and respected stars of Hollywood's studio era.

This chapter is not concerned with the peak years of Cary Grant's stardom from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Rather, it investigates his lesser-known early years in Hollywood, and how he finally made a breakthrough in two screwball comedies released in 1937, Topper (independently-made and distributed by MGM) and The Awful Truth (Columbia). At issue is the creation of Grant's star persona – the combination of his image, the characters he played, and the publicity surrounding him that came to form his public identity. Investigating this star persona therefore involves analysis of his film roles, the reams of publicity materials that promoted him to the cinema-going public, and, as far as possible, audience responses in the form of popularity rankings and box-office results.

This is not a biographical study, but some commentary on Grant's actual identity is nonetheless important.