He was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904 but became world famous as film icon Cary Grant.
His mother died when he was age nine, and that contributed to issues with women for the rest of his life.
At 18, he joined a theater troupe that took him to the US. He then toured the American vaudeville circuit.
But his long-lasting success was as a movie star. Throughout the 20th Century few actors achieved his level of worldwide fame.
In 1949, after two unsuccessful marriages that ended in divorces, he married Betsy Drake who co-starred with him in two movies. She remained his wife longer than any other woman.
Aside from acting, she was a Harvard-educated psychotherapist.
By the early 1950s, despite decades of unparalleled fame and fortune, Grant wondered whether his career was over. He was depressed.
He had his wife Betsy removed as his co-star for the 1958 movie Houseboat in favor of Sophia Loren, with whom he’d been having a secret affair… despite the fact that Betsy had written the first draft of Houseboat’s script.
Betsy had been seeing a Beverly Hills psychiatrist and began receiving his drug treatment.
Thanks to Betsy, Cary began seeing the shrink, too, and they became two of the earliest adopters of LSD therapy.
A Swiss lab scientist named Albert Hoffman had created lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938. He tested it on himself five years later. For the next decade, much was written and discussed about the drug and its possible uses in treating a number of psychiatric issues.
Under the control of his Beverly Hills doctor, Grant dropped acid over 100 times in a three-year period from 1958–61.
He wrote high praise for the experiences in his autobiography: “I learned a great deal — and the result of it all was rebirth. A new assessment of life and myself in it. An immeasurably beneficial cleansing of so many needless fears and guilts, and a release of the tensions that had been the result of them. Not a cleansing and release of them all, certainly, for that would be the absolute — the innocence of the newly born baby with an unformed ego still close to God…”
While receiving LSD treatments, Cary Grant had a career rebound.
The result was some of the best films he ever made, including Charade and Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest.
1959: Grant admitted to reporter Joe Hyams during the filming of Operation Petticoat that he had taken acid.
But when a New York newspaper printed the story, Grant publicly denied it. Admitting to drug use was bad publicity.
The story ran anyway. Grant sued Hyams stating that he’d never met the reporter. Hyams countersued and showed photos of them together. They settled out of court.
Part of the settlement included Grant writing his own autobiography, which appeared in several issues of the Ladies Home Journal in 1963. In his own words, Grant admitted to — and hailed — the LSD treatments.
His marriage to Betsy disintegrated. They divorced.
He retired from showbiz at age 62. Shortly thereafter, he married Dyan Cannon.
In 1968, an auto accident landed him — and a woman he was having an affair with — in the hospital. That led to his divorce from Cannon a week later.
No amount of LSD, it seemed, could provide him with matrimonial bliss.
But to his dying day, Cary Grant claimed that the drug saved his life, and he lamented when it was made illegal.
As he stated in his autobiography, “[H]ow men can be authorities on something they’ve never tried mystifies me.”
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