Cary Grant

Whenever I catch the beginning of "North by Northwest" on TV (and it's often on these days) I cannot turn it off for at least 20 minutes; it is one of the best openings to a film I've ever seen. Cary Grant at his smoothest and handsomest (though really he was rather old for the part - older in fact than the woman who played his mother) involved in a spy plot that enabled him to show the two sides of the character he always was in films: sophisticated and suspicious at one and the same time. His verbal sparring with James Mason, in his sophisticated and deeply-ingrained-nastiness role, is wonderful to behold, choreographed brilliantly by Hitchcock. Then his drunk scene. Playing drunk can often be embarrassing to watch rather than funny; Grant makes it hilarious. And soon after, the scene in the UN building when a man is killed and Grant, catching him as he falls, removes the knife from the man's back and stands there, to be photographed, knife in hand over the dead body. Here he does a marvellous about turn: at first he is showing the crowd that it had nothing to do with him; then, realising he must appear to be the killer, sees that the only way he won't be arrested is to pretend he is the killer and to threaten everyone around him with the knife. It's a brilliant piece of thoughful acting that I wonder if anyone else could have achieved. Certainly not James Mason however masterful an actor he was. James Stewart maybe? Robert Mitchum maybe not.
David Thomson writes: "As well as being a leading box office draw..... he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema."
Agreed.