‘Look, Jennifer is a remarkable woman, and she loved her dad, but when I found out what she thought about him I had to completely ignore it.” This is the actor Jason Isaacs contemplating Cary Grant from a sofa in the west London headquarters of ITVX. “Jennifer” is Jennifer Grant, Cary Grant’s grown-up daughter, whom Isaacs consulted about playing her father in the forthcoming four-part warts and all biopic Archie (after Archie Leach, Grant’s birth name).
The series is by turns eerie, discomfiting and tragic, and features a career-best performance from the 60-year-old Harry Potter star Isaacs, who fully shatters the surface sheen of everyone’s favourite mid-Atlantic smoothie. This Grant, star of the stone-cold Hollywood classics Bringing Up Baby, Suspicion and North by Northwest,
