Key Points
During the casting process for Archie a forthcoming series for ITVX about the life of Cary Grant, the late actors daughter, Jennifer, had several, unbreakable criteria..
The question is how precisely he pulled this off and in the show, which has been written by Jeff Pope, who also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated movie, Philomena, the story flips between the childhood of Archibald Alexander Leach, as he was then known, and the mature Cary, who with his daughters approval, is played by Jason Isaacs..
Reinvention stories are so common as to be banal in Hollywood, but Carys is particularly wild: born into extreme poverty in Bristol, where his father, Elias, worked in a clothing factory and his mother, Elsie, was a seamstress, he had an older brother who died of an illness before Archibald was born..
These kinds of secrets manifest in ways later on, says Jennifer, and her desire to collaborate with Pope on the show was motivated in part by a need to look squarely at the things her father never told her and in so doing exorcise the last of his demons..
Jennifers own children, a 14-year-old son she called Cary, and her daughter, Davian, who is 11, were born long after Carys death; he would have been thrilled by them, she says..
