A prop gravestone in Arsenic and Old Lace carries the name Archie Leach, the real birth name of Cary Grant, and this episode argues that the suave screen persona was less a stage name than a meticulously engineered suit of armor. Born in Bristol in 1904 into poverty and grief, Archie lost his mother at age nine when his father committed her to an institution and told the boy she had gone on holiday, then that she had died. The father remarried and left him with his grandmother.

From expulsion at 14 and a touring acrobatic troupe to the RMS Olympic crossing alongside Douglas Fairbanks, vaudeville stilt-walking at Coney Island, and the Paramount screen test that renamed him in 1931, the conversation follows how he built a new identity from scratch. It then examines his unprecedented decision to become Hollywood’s first major freelance actor in 1936, the deathbed confession that revealed his mother had been alive for 22 years, five marriages, Hitchcock’s use of his darker edge in Suspicion and Notorious, and his retirement in 1966 to raise his daughter Jennifer.

• The mid-Atlantic accent as a deliberate erasure of a working-class Bristol dialect
• Acrobatics as a way to master the one thing he could control: his own body
• Why he refused a prenuptial settlement from heiress Barbara Hutton during the marriage the press nicknamed cash and carry
• Investments in Acapulco land and board seats at MGM and Fabergé as a financial fortress against the studios
• His late-life one-man show, the 1970 Honorary Academy Award, and the line that even he wanted to be Cary Grant