The man behind the mask!

Every man is an enigma, you don’t know a person by mere words, yet words are the air to the soul of its speaker, it shows how they are made of.

We can hide behind the mask but we can never vanish in the mask except by becoming insane!

That is what Archie Leach was behind the Cary Grand Mask. He tried to hide but couldn’t as the true person was always there. Some claim that he bettered himself till he became the person he aspired to, but aren’t we all?!

May be his dream was to be Cary Grant, the confident debonair that has the heart of gold, the only common thing was he also had that same heart of gold. His anxieties and unrelaxed manner which were hidden behind the relaxed enjoying figure, became him at last. But at least he was honest with himself, knowing when he is acting, until the lines blurred as he reached his fifties where an excisional crisis occurred to him, there he sought help and was offered to our shock now, the once common LSD!!

A 100 sessions took him back to himself, make him accept who he is and once was!

But why on earth was Archie so painful to hide behind a façade?

Archie was weak, he was the one abandoned by his mother as a child and his father later by having another son and wife, he was the loneliest man on earth, he was unlovable, even his grandmother was harsh and unloving which is a bit unheard of, so he just escaped!

The bender group and family were the closest he ever came to having a family, living in a dorm like home, with colleagues and fellow trainees , he learned how the big family could be through them!

That is why he lived with Rodolph Scott, and that is why he married five times. He needed to be part of a family desperately. Needless to say it was also painful to him, because each time he loses a wife or a friend like brother, it all comes gushing in his memories, the pain , the rejection, the agony!

The only person who couldn’t bail on him in his opinion was his own child, that is why he showered her with all the love he  wanted to give and never found a vent for.

It is strange that two of his movies deal with adoption in different forms, although he married many times , he never had children of his own, later he admitted that it was selfish of him, or was it the fear of bringing to this world another person that has to suffer or make you acknowledge your own suffering!