Famous Actor Cary Grant and His Strong Bond With His Daughter

Their father-daughter bond was the stuff of legends. Grant loved and supported her even though he wasn’t able to be there all the time – as shown in Jennifer’s 2011 memoir.  In this post, we’ll look at the life of Cary Grant, the life of Jennifer Grant, and the strong father-daughter bond that exists to this day – long after Cary Grant’s death.

Born in Horfield, England in 1904, Cary Grant grew up as the only child of Elias and Elsie Leach. He grew up poor. Grant’s father, Elias, was an alcoholic, and his mother, Elsie, was prone to depression caused by the fact that her first-born son (Grant’s older brother) died from tuberculosis before the age of one.

Grant was never given any further explanation as to why his mother abandoned him, so he grew to resent her. Later on, Elias told his son that Elsie had died –- causing Grant’s resentment to turn to grief. He carried that grief around until, decades later, he found out the truth.

Although he felt betrayed by his father, Grant was also happy to know his mother was still alive. When he went to go visit her, however, that happiness turned to pain because Elsie didn’t recognize him. 

After his first painful visit with Elsie, Grant decided to take her out of the institution. He bought her a house and visited her often. However, despite Grant’s best intentions, the 22 years of confinement had taken its toll on Elsie, and she never fully recovered.

The first one came in 1934. Grant met Virginia Cherill, a beautiful American actress known for her role in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. In February of that year, they got married; by March of the following year, they were divorced. It didn’t end well – Cherill claimed abuse, and the tumultuous proceedings were covered in the tabloids.

Although Grant grew up poor and Hutton grew up rich, their lives were similar in other ways. Both Grant and Hutton lost their mothers at an early age, both had neglectful fathers, and both were divorced at the time they met. They got along and decided to tie the knot in 1942.

The press dubbed them “Cash and Cary” and spread rumors that Cary married Hutton for her money – despite the fact that he was already wealthy. To further dispel the rumors and prove he wasn’t after her money, Cary refused to accept a financial settlement in their prenuptial agreement.

This divorce, unlike Grant’s previous one, didn’t end bitterly. There were no long drawn out arguments over finances or sensationalistic coverage in the press. The mental cruelty that caused the divorce seemed to dissipate after it, and the two remained friends for a long time.

Grant’s career took a bit of a slump in the early 1950s, however, it didn’t last long. By the mid-to-late 1950s, Grant had returned to stardom with hits like To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

A few years after their divorce, Grant became enamored by Dyan Cannon, an actress who was 33 years his junior. Cannon was in films, TV shows, and a Broadway musical. In 1965, Cannon and Grant were married in a hotel and casino owned by Howard Hughes.

Although Grant was committed to raising his daughter, that commitment didn’t mean that his marriage to Cannon was going to work. Three years after their wedding ceremony, the couple called it quits. After a bit of a legal battle, they figured out a co-parenting schedule.

Although Grant and Cannon negotiated a co-parenting schedule and child support, it didn’t always go smoothly. Like many divorces, there were emotional challenges they had to work through, including the sadness that Jennifer felt in not having both of her parents together.

That disagreement caused them to require the services of a judge who could arbitrate a fair deal. Whatever the outcome, Grant knew that he would always love his daughter – and that his ex-wife would too. This love from both parents was reflected in Jennifer’s growing personality.

While being interviewed in the early 1970s, Grant held up a picture of his 7-year-old daughter and said, “if I had not been so utterly stupid or selfish… I would have had a hundred children, and I would have built a ranch to keep them on.”

That love continued until he died in 1986. An obituary in The New York Times said that Grant “took great joy in his loving relationship with his only child – his daughter, Jennifer – whose mother was his fourth wife, the actress Dyan Cannon.”

At the time of her father’s death, Jennifer was only 20 years old. According to his wishes, she was to be given half of her inheritance when she turned 30, and the rest of it when she turned 35.

Grant opted against having a massive funeral with public memorials and praise. Instead, he wanted his body to be cremated and his ashes to be spread over the Pacific Ocean as well as his favorite hills in California. Whether that happened or not is only known to his close family.

Even though Cannon and Grant’s marriage was far from perfect, she didn’t let her marital troubles cloud her judgment of his parenting abilities. Cannon knew he was a good father and didn’t want him to be absent from Jennifer’s life. “Honey, it’s okay to love your dad,” Cannon told Jennifer.

For two weekends a month and one full month out of the year, Jennifer would go live with her father. Despite the personal issues that arose from their divorce, Cannon still had respect and love for Grant and never tried to use Jennifer as a bargaining chip to get back at him.

Later on, as Jennifer’s autonomy grew, she wanted to make her own decisions – like going out and doing things when visiting her father. Grant would often defer to Cannon and tell Jennifer that she had to call her mother to find out what time she had to be back.

This inability to know how to raise a child might be related to the fact that Cary Grant didn’t have very good parents during his own childhood. Whether that’s a valid excuse or not, it fell on Cannon to pick up the slack – and she did! Jennifer “turned out to be a great kid,” Cannon said, “so I must have done something right.”

Dyan Cannon said that her private conversations with her daughter were to remain private. However, she did give some basic details about her life. Jennifer was a 22-year-old graduate from Stanford University with a degree in American Studies. She was also working on a TV special about her dad. 

Jennifer, however, was different. She didn’t feel pressure to be just like her dad. Cannon attributed this to the fact that Jennifer had loving parents and “a really good center.”

In the early 1990s, she landed a role as Celeste Lundy in the hit TV series Beverly Hills, 90210. She also guest-starred in a few episodes of Friends and had a minor cameo in CSI. Throughout the 1990s through the 2010s, she appeared in films that range from Savage (1996) to Little Loopers (2015).

Cary Grant’s good looks didn’t fade with age – part of the reason Dyan Cannon was attracted to him despite being 33 years younger. He aged gracefully – a quality that transferred over to his daughter as well.

His name – Cary Benjamin Grant – paid tribute to her beloved father. When People magazine interviewed her shortly thereafter, Jennifer described the joys of being a new mother. “Cary Benjamin sleeps dreamily on my stomach,” she said. “He’s phenomenal.”

Her feelings changed, however, as the due date was approaching. On second thought, giving her newborn son the name “Cary” was a touching way to keep her father’s memory alive. “And, anyway,” she said, “my father wasn’t Cary to me. He was Dad.”

Cary Grant was well-known for his comedic roles in movies like The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story. “No one had better comic timing than Dad,” Jennifer said. That comedic timing seemed to transfer over to her young son, Cary Benjamin Grant.

Jennifer wanted to understand her father’s essence rather than his film career. To her, that essence was passion. “For the last 20 years of his life,” she said, “I was given the extraordinary privilege to experience the full, vital passion of his heart.”

That, however, didn’t last too long. After hearing about her father’s death, something inside her changed. “When Dad died, I shifted gears in ten seconds flat,” she said. She left San Francisco for Los Angeles and began to pursue acting.

She worked through this grief in two primary ways: acting and writing. Her acting career helped her to take part in one of her father’s greatest passions. Writing her 2011 memoir helped her to bring up and cherish all the thoughts and feelings she had toward him.

Jennifer said, “Was Dad gay? My gut instinct was [that] he was straight. Perhaps his maverick nature coupled with his grace made him difficult to categorize.” It also made him quite the flirt with both men and women.

Cannon agreed with her daughter’s theory that Cary Grant enjoyed the rumors surrounding his sexuality. Supposedly those rumors, “made women want to prove them wrong,” Cannon said.

When a famous person like Cary Grant dies, however, the media wants to know everything about it. How does the family feel? Was he a good father? Jennifer worked through this extra burden during the process of writing her memoir.

Cannon corroborated this in her interview with the Daily Mail. “Though he was so happy to be a father, he’d also get scared as it brought up memories of his childhood,” she said. Perhaps he was afraid that he’d fail at fatherhood and cause misery for his daughter.

During the 2010s, she continued to keep the memory of her famous father alive by telling her children about him and by speaking about him in public appearances. For example, at the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival, she had plenty of kind words to say while being interviewed on the red carpet.

Jennifer didn’t have a simple answer because she had “all sorts of reactions” to seeing Grant on the big screen. Sometimes she was excited, other times she was surprised – especially when Grant was shown to do something that he would never do in real life.

However, there are dozens of movies that feature Grant, so she can always get an understanding of what he was like through those. It’s not always accurate. Jennifer recalled him lighting up a cigarette on screen and thought, “Oh Dad, what are you doing? You would never pick up a cigarette. You hated nicotine!’”

Jennifer still experiences sudden bouts of sadness when thinking about her father. Often, this can lead to tears – a clear indication that Jennifer had a very strong bond with her famous father.