Cary Grant

His cremated ashes were given to his family. One of the top collectors of Modern American art, Hopper's collection is worth millions of dollars. It was just before one of these performances — in Davenport, Iowa — that Grant suffered a severe stroke and died in hospital a few hours later. According to the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/) Dennis Hopper has an average Bacon number of 2.679 making him third on the list of most suitable centres of the Hollywood universe. This calculation uses a modification of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the USA with his "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would show clips from his films and afterward hold a question-and-answer session with the audience. He recently contributed to the film 1 Giant Leap with provocative anecdotes on spirituality, unity and culture. His fourth marriage was to actress Dyan Cannon, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Jennifer Grant, who would later become an actress herself. He also co-starred in the 1994 blockbuster Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

In 1981, he received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was nominated for an Emmy award for the 1991 HBO films Paris Trout and Doublecrossed (in which he played real life drug smuggler and DEA informant Barry Seal). Although twice nominated for an Academy Award, he never won but was honored in 1970 with a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has continued to be an important individual in Hollywood both as an actor, photographer and director. In the mid-1950s Grant formed his own production company, Grantley Productions, and via a distribution deal with Universal produced some of his finest work, which included Operation Petticoat, Indiscreet, That Touch Of Mink (co-starring Doris Day), and Father Goose. In 1988, Hopper directed a critically acclaimed film about Los Angeles gangs called Colors. In the September, 1959 issue of Look magazine, Grant related how treatment with LSD at a prestigious California clinic -- it was legal at the time -- had finally brought him inner peace after yoga, hypnotism, and mysticism had proved ineffective. Because I am Frank Booth!" (which raised a question for Lynch "That's great for the movie, but how are we gonna have lunch with him?") Hopper won critical acclaim and a slew of awards for this role and the same year won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Hoosiers.

Howard Hawks was just as devoted, saying that Grant was "so far the best that there isn't anybody to be compared to him". After reading the script, Hopper called Lynch and told him "You have to let me play Frank Booth. Hitchcock, who was notorious for disliking actors, was very fond of Grant, saying that Grant was "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". However, it was not until he portrayed the oxygen-huffing, obscenity-screaming Frank Booth in David Lynch's film Blue Velvet (1986) that his career truly revived. He was a versatile actor, who did demanding physical comedy in movies like "Gunga Din" with the skills he had learned on the stage. He gave powerful performances in Rumble Fish (1983) and The Osterman Weekend (1983). Grant was one of Hollywood's top box-office attractions for several decades. In the early 1980s, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation program and cured himself of his addictions.

Grant subsequently took that character in a far darker direction in Suspicion, directed by Hitchcock, without somehow losing his charm or his audience's devotion. However, Hopper did act in several films during this period such as Mad Dog Morgan (1976), Tracks (1976), The American Friend (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979) and he won acclaim for directing and acting in Out of the Blue (1980). These performances solidifed his appeal, and The Philadelphia Story, with Hepburn, established his best-known screen role: the charming if sometimes unreliable man, formerly married to an intelligent and strong-willed woman who first divorced him, then realized that he was — with all his faults — irresistible. Hopper had long been an alcoholic and drug abuser and it was at this point his addiction began to dominate his life. Grant starred in some of the classic screwball comedies, including The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne, Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn, His Girl Friday with Rosalind Russell and Arsenic and Old Lace with Priscilla Lane. Hopper wrote and directed another film that was released in 1971 called The Last Movie that was a box office failure and derailed his career for years. Grant became the surrogate father and had a lifelong influence on her son, Lance Reventlow. Hopper won wide acclaim as the director of the film for his improvisational methods and stop action photography.

He became an American citizen on June 26th, 1942 and shortly thereafter married the wealthy socialite Barbara Hutton. Although Hopper was able to resume acting in mainstream films including The Sons Of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969), in both of these films he had death scenes with John Wayne, it was not until he teamed with Peter Fonda and made Easy Rider that he really shook up the Hollywood establishment. This film became an anthem of sorts to the lost generation of the Vietnam war and to this day is one of the most successful independent film ever made. After some success in light Broadway comedies, he made it to Hollywood in 1931, where he acquired the name "Cary Grant". He also was very talented as a painter and a poet. Grant traveled with the troupe to the United States in 1920 for a two year tour; when the troupe returned to the United Kingdom, Grant stayed — creating over time that unique accent and persona that mixed working and upper class accents as he supported himself as, among other things, a hawker. Hopper also became an accomplished professional photographer (he has had many exhibitions of his work). After being expelled, in 1918 (from Fairfield School, Bristol) for an incident involving the girls' toilets, he joined the Bob Pender stage troupe. He appeared in over 140 episodes of television shows such as Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, The Defenders, The Big Valley, The Time Tunnel and Combat.

Grant's unhappy childhood, by his own account, led him to crave applause and attention and to create a new persona that would attract it. Hopper moved to New York and studied at the famous Lee Strasberg acting school. Lucky. This infamous incident resulted in him being blacklisted from films for several years. Those traits also come through more directly in many of his performances, in films as different as Suspicion and Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and tear-jerkers, such as Mr. Hopper refused directions for 80 takes over several days. That left Archie Leach/Cary Grant with both a certain insecurity in his relations with women and a secretiveness about his inner life that may explain his bravado and charm. Dean's death in a 1955 car accident affected the young Hopper deeply and it was shortly afterwards that he got into a confrontation with veteran director Henry Hathaway on the film From Hell To Texas.