Notorious , the Hitchcock thriller co-starring Ingrid Bergman, will be shown in a wine cellar, while Bringing Up Baby , in which Grant plays a palaeontologist, will screen at Bristol City Museum.
The festival will remember another local legend by showing the classic weepie An Affair to Remember , in which Grant plays opposite fellow Bristolian Deborah Kerr. By feting the man once known as Archie Leach in his own hometown, the festival also offers a chance to look into the background of this unusual movie star. And where exactly does that distinctive, strangulated accent come from? Born in Bristol on 18 January , the young Archie would visit the music hall with his father.
On one of those trips, in , he first saw his idol Charlie Chaplin on stage with the Fred Karno troupe. His first job in the theatre was as a teenager, operating the stage lights at the Bristol Hippodrome, which further convinced him that he wanted to tread the boards. Like Chaplin, he started out on the variety stage, doing acrobatics and comedy acts β very far from being a leading man.
He was a fine physical comedian , especially good at taking a fall, tumbling and walking on stilts. You can see that boisterous slapstick on display in his films, especially the screwball comedies of the s such as the sublime The Awful Truth or Bringing Up Baby. Leach found crossing the Atlantic exciting: he had often watched the boats in Bristol harbour as a boy, and dreamed of escape and show business.
The trip became even more fun for the teenager when he realised that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were on board.
