The 100 Greatest Performances
68. Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Before we knew him as the dashing Hitchcock hero or the Deborah Kerr–Audrey Hepburn romantic foil, Grant made his mark with an outsize comedic talent, on raucous display in this screwball classic. As Bringing Up Baby’s straitlaced, bumbling paleontologist, he stammers and cringes, walks into doors, bumps heads, sings with a dog, slips on an olive, dons a negligee, and generally makes impressive use of the acrobat training he had as a youth—all to survive run-ins with Katharine Hepburn’s disaster-prone, leopard-losing heiress. To explain the Huxley character, director Howard Hawks handed Grant a pair of round spectacles and pointed him toward the great silent comedian Harold Lloyd. But Huxley is all Cary Grant—intercostal clavicle and all.
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Photo courtesty of Movie Library Archives Hachette Filipacchi Media/DR.
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