Cary Grants favorite poem!!

[Tim Mc CAFFREY]

Like all move fans I love reading biographies and sometimes some pretty funny items come to light. For instance despite his movie image as the perfect English gentleman, Cary Grant came from a very rough part of London and his perfect manners and diction were acquired when he became an actor. However he never lost his liking for simple jokes and amusing rhymes and the following little "Limerick" was in fact his favorite piece of "poetry". When they gave me a box of toy soldiers I threw all the generals away, I smashed up the captains and colonels, Now I play with my privates all day! I wonder if Bob Taylor had a favorite joke or "poem"

[Alejandra]

Who are we, really? Good question...
I think he was a man named Spangler Arlington Brugh, and an actor and moviestar called Robert Taylor, the name MGM gave him. On screen, before the cameras he was Robert Taylor but on the set, with friends and relatives he was always Arlington, close to his roots, his land and its people. Of course I am talking about the same person, because he was a down to earth one, as man and as professional, in his public and private life. Because success and fame never went to his head.
He said in an interview on September 1937:
"I've said that when I first came to the studio I was afraid of the stars. I was. I had been a fan, you see, on the other side of the line. I used to believe that these people were a mixture of moonlight, magic and probable madness- and not mere flesh and blood people like me. I'm not afraid of them now. I have discovered that they are just human beings and swell, hard-working ones at that."
"In almost every interview I've given, I have talked about this last year and what it has meant to me, and how I've reacted to it, and so forth and so on. I've said that I don't think I am spoiled, don't feel spoiled, hope I never will be. My reasons why I am sure I will never be spoiled are: my parents, my home life and my young boyhood. I've said that I feel , if anything, an increasing sense of responsability, a sense of the gravity of the work itself, and a need to keep my feet planted firmly."

[Tim Mc CAFFREY]

Please excuse me for taking so long to re-visit this most excellent site....which by the way is by far my most favorite site on the whole web! In my humble opinion Robert Taylor was both blessed and cursed with his extraordinary good looks. For, an actor of inferior intellect to Taylors, such handsome features would indeed have been a great blessing. But when looks began to fade as they always do, the effect on a less intelligent actor would have been catastrophic both professionally and personally. That Robert Taylor coped so well with the ageing process says an awful lot about both his mentality and maturity. That the memory of Robert Taylor survives to this day has little to do with his good looks: there are countless very handsome actors from Taylors era who are now long forgotten, no it was Taylors talent that set him apart from the rest and ensured his memory. Thinking of Robert Taylor I recall an interview from actor Robert Cummings many years ago. A therapist friend of his had once told him that an actor is three things: What he thinks he is: What he thinks others thinks he is: and what he really is: While Kirk Douglas said that John Wayne's biggest problem was that he thought he "really" was John Wayne. I think Robert Taylor was always Robert Taylor and never tried to be anyone else. This fact alone makes him one of the few really naturally charismatic movie stars of them all. All the assets that carried him so successfully through life were his birthright which makes one of the most natural superstars of the them all....I'm sorry I have to cut this short as it's now 5 A.m. here in Ireland and I have to head off fishing and cast my nets in the hope of a good catch.....in the meantime good luck to you all, regards, Tim,

[Alejandra]

The ability to play very different roles, and the ability to inhabit, to embody the roles with conviction, is what defines a good actor in my opinion. There are performers who play themselves in every movie whatever character they play no matter what the quality of the material. These ones are definitively bad actors, and there are performers who, succeeding in playing certain role, are stereotyped despite being good actors. Some end up pigeonholed for ever, (reluctantly or willingly) repeatedly playing the same role throughout their careers, others don't give up and get to grow in stature with time. Although I haven't seen everything John Wayne is done, it seems to me that he has played the same role every time I've seen him. May be he was limited by the genre playing within a limited range of parts. Nevertheless, or I must say, because of that, he became the quintessential movie cowboy as Humphrey Bogart was the quintessential movie tough guy (although he played a different kind of role in "In a Lonely Place" and "The Caine Mutiny" giving his best performances I think). Grant played the suave, charming and witty gentleman in a number of excellent movies which have become unforgettable classics (The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth...) and he became an icon. I am not aware of any complaints or concerns from John Wayne about playing the same role but in the case of Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine once said regarding "Suspicion": "Cary had been thrilled to be cast as Johnnie because he liked to do serious parts and didn't want to be typecast for comedy just because he did it so well". By the way, Hitchcock had to change the ending of Suspicion because the producers didn't get away with making the charming and handsome Grant a coldblooded murderer. He said in an interview:
"The ending of Suspicion was a complete mistake because of making that story with Cary Grant. Unless you have a cynical ending it makes the story too simple. Suspicion deals with a man whose wife suspects he's a murderer. When he brings her up that glass of milk at the end of the picture, she knows he's going to murder her, but in our film, we have to make it a harmless glass of milk. In truth, the ending of the picture should be Joan Fontaine accepting that she is going to be murdered".
"The problem of having the leading man, Cary Grant in this case, be guilty was the same problem we had faced in The Lodger. In those days, the audience wouldn't have put up with Ivor Novello being guilty, especially vvomen, and a lot of the audience would be women anytime he was in a film".
"For the sake of their own careers, important stars won't be villains. The idols that we put up there must do no wrong. If they do, audiences don't approve of that sort of thing.
Having Cary Grant as the hero meant I had to compromise. The best you could have was a bit of doubt, and not much of that. Once the decision was made to have Grant, it was like Novello, he had to be innocent".

Regarding transition from leading man to character actor, I don't know about Bob Taylor. In my opinion, playing secondary characters it's a natural evolution in an actor when he gets older. Although Bob had small roles in two of his last pictures ("Hondo" and the terrible "Where Angels Go Trouble Follows!")he never lost his leading man status I think.

Thank you very much for calling me "Linda" Tim, but I must confess I'm not beautiful at all! LOL

[Linda Alexander]

Tim, the earlier comment was from Alejandra but I'll put my "2 cents" in. ; >

Bob Taylor had a dry, almost sarcastic sense of humor. So many thought he had no sense of humor at all, & I believe that misconception came from the fact that he was guarded & shared when he was comfy w/someone, not just arbitrarily. He was also often accused of "playing himself" on screen. Maybe that's the mark of a true actor, someone who can invest their own personality into so many different characterizations & yet still manage to stay true to oneself.

I can tell you that in all the interviews I've done w/actors, I've found that each of them tend to find a niche, if their career is long enough, & that niche becomes a sort of "typecasting." Yet it's typecasting only because that's what they do so well. And why do they do it so well? It's because ... that sort of role--whatever it is, whether it's a moody sort or a devil-may-care person or even someone w/a penchant for meanness--is in their very nature. Are they always that way? No, but they're more adept at that characterization because that characterization is close to home insofar who they inherently are.

Taylor, according to a source, was a political & news junkie. Even into older days, he would watch the news, listen to it on radio, devour newspapers. He was predicting that events in the Middle East would take the world to a very dangerous place long before we became a society obsessed w/that scenario. My point--he didn't change his stripes & his indicators in later years were the same as they were in earlier years. He simply matured & rearranged how he displayed those personality points.

[Tim Mc CAFFREY]

Thats very interesting Linda and goes to show once again just how difficult a job acting really is..although some undoubtedly find it much more difficult than others. Actors who constantly play themselves, their real selves on screen often don't have the talent to play other roles convincingly and spend their whole career playing what is in essence the same character in every movie. Of course some actors can have great success playing the same character throughout their careers but when they are taken from their comfort zone, John Wayne being a prime example, they usually fall far short of what is required. I have to say that Cary Grant was not among my favorite actors but when I read his biography and understood the man a bit more I began to have more respect for him. That he was able to convincingly play the ideal English gentleman, which from his upbringing he plainly was not, from his earliest days in Hollywood was a testament to his acting ability. I can recall one movie which Grant made with Frank Sinatra which was called I believe the Pride and the Glory or something similar where the emphasis was on action rather than comedy and as a consequence Grants performance was very unconvincing. It seems Grant was a major star who excelled in light comedy and little else....in his case it was quite enough! Big Stars, not surprisingly are slow to accept roles which would not only clash with their image but would also stretch their acting ability. Of the Hollywood stars from the "golden age" the actor most likely to attempt a role unfamiliar to his fans seems to have been Robert Mitchum. His performance as the timid schoolteacher in Ryan's Daughter was sensitive, convincing and the opposite to almost any role he had played before and was undoubtedly, apart from the photography, the best thing in an epic move which was also a failure of epic proportions. Many of the old Hollywood stars had very productive later careers such as Mitchum, Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and others, and I often wonder if Robert Taylor had lived long enough to become a "character actor" what great performances he might have given in his later years. Who knows, sometime in the future they might use some computer wizardry and create new roles for Bob Taylor...anything's possible I guess!

[Alejandra]

I really enjoy Cary Grant's fine sense of humor. I love this guy, but when I say I love Cary Grant I mean I love Cary Grant playing Cary Grant, you know, I love "the character", the charming and debonaire gentleman. I always felt alone among classic films fans saying this until I found this revealing statement made by himself:

"I've often been accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you'd suppose. To play yourself—your true self—is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They're playing themselves...but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.
In my earlier career I patterned myself on a combination of Englishmen—AE Matthews, Noel Coward, and Jack Buchanan, who impressed me as a character actor. He always looked so natural. I tried to copy men I thought were sophisticated and well dressed like Douglas Fairbanks or Cole Porter. And Freddie Lonsdale, the British playwright, always had an engaging answer for everything.
I cultivated raising one eyebrow and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser pocket with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn't get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration!
I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me."