The 6 Best Cary Grant Movies

Best Cary Grant Performances

"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Any conversation about the most iconic leading men from Hollywood’s Golden Age must include Grant, an actor who loomed so large in pop culture that even Grant himself struggled to live up to his on-screen persona.

But behind that polished character was a troubled man that many never knew until now. On Dec. 7, a four-part miniseries on Grant's life titled Archie will be premiering on BritBox. (Grant's real name was Archie Leach.) Starring Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs in the title role, it chronicles Grant as he goes from blue-collar boy from the backstreets of Bristol, England, to marquee star.

Talented and versatile to the extreme, Grant and his suave charm excelled not only in big-hearted romances, but taut suspenseful thrillers and screwball comedies as well. To celebrate the release of Archie, here are six of Grant's best movies.

Best Cary Grant movies

1. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Nobody mastered madcap comedy quite like the former vaudeville performer. “I loved this movie,” Jennifer Grant, Cary Grant's daughter, says, “because I loved the farcical play between Katharine Hepburn and my dad.” He plays a bespectacled paleontologist near the completion of a brontosaurus skeleton. But to find the remaining bone—the intercostal clavicle!—he must team up with a whirlwind socialite (Hepburn). Naturally, mishaps galore befall them both during their adventure. This film marked the first of Grant’s five films with director Howard Hawks and the second with Hepburn (after 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett). They’d reunite again in 1938’s Holiday.

Related: 20 Romantic Comedies From the Golden Age of Hollywood That Still Make Us Swoon Today

2. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Grant names this Frank Capra-directed surreal comedy as one of her favorites. Based on the long-running play (and a bit of a precursor to The Munsters and The Addams Family), it features Grant as the straight man dealing with the chaos around him. His Mortimer Brewster is trying to wed his fiancée (Priscilla Lane) when he learns that his two seemingly eccentric aunts are actually serial killers who serve arsenic-laced elderberry wine to put lonely old bachelors out of their misery. And just when things can’t get nuttier, a look-alike of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster shows up.

3. An Affair To Remember (1957)

This tear-jerking remake of 1939’s Love Affair received a pop-culture resurgence in the ’90s thanks to the rom-com Sleepless in Seattle. In case you forgot Rita Wilson’s tearful recap, here goes: Nickie (Grant), a playboy artist, meets Terry (Deborah Kerr) on an ocean liner while they’re both with other partners. When they get back to NYC, they make a pact to see one another again atop the Empire State Building in six months. Though tragedy strikes—Terry is struck by a car en route to meet him!—the two ultimately meet and live happily ever after. “It’s just brilliant,” Cannon says. “I still watch it and get goosebumps.”

4. North by Northwest (1959)

The fourth and final collaboration between Grant and Alfred Hitchcock is also their most gripping. (“We had dinner with Alfred and his wife often,” Dyan Cannon, Grant's ex-wife says. “He loved Cary.”) Here, Grant stars as an ordinary white-collar ad executive who’s mistaken for a secret agent named “George Kaplan.” He’s shortly kidnapped, taken to a Long Island estate, interrogated about being a spy and then left for dead via a fake drunk-driving accident. He ends up on a tense cross-country journey that includes a chase atop Mount Rushmore. And the menacing crop-duster plane swooping over him in a cornfield remains an indelible American cinema moment.

5. Charade (1963)

“What’s not to love about him in this movie?” Cannon says. “He’s handsome, funny, charming, identifiable and lovable.” In this Hitchcock-like, Parisian-set thriller, an interpreter (Audrey Hepburn) returns from a vacation in the Alps to learn that her husband has emptied out their apartment and got himself murdered while leaving town. Grant kills as a ne’er-do-well character who hides his true motivations throughout the movie. Despite a 25-year age gap between the stars, their chemistry is undeniable. Cannon adds that she became “very close friends” with Hepburn behind the scenes.

Related: The 23 Biggest Movies and Stars Snubbed By the Academy

6. To Catch a Thief (1955)

Grant’s John Robie, a retired cat burglar known for snatching precious jewels, discovers that someone is impersonating him. His only way out of the mess is to catch the imposter in the act. The No. 1 suspect? A rich American widower (Jessie Royce Landis) and her gorgeous daughter, Frances (Grace Kelly). A cat-and-mouse game ensues even as the attraction between John and Frances intensifies. “I love Grace and my dad in this movie,” says Jennifer Grant. “They fit together like a hand in glove.” Plus, she notes, “He really does move like a cat!”

Stream Archie on BritBox starting on Dec. 7

Next, We Rank the 15 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies of All Time