Cary Grant: a biography Marc Eliot Aurum Press, 436pp, £18.99 ISBN 1845130731

Cary Grant made his first film when he was 28. Despite this late start, he dominated Hollywood for three decades, his combination of humour and sophisticated charm ensuring perennial popularity at the box office. But while the suave air he projected on screen seems to have come naturally to him, it owed nothing to his upbringing.

Grant was born Archibald Leach to working-class parents in Bristol in 1904, and his childhood was shaped first by the break-up of his parents' marriage and then by news of his mother's early death. Abandoned by his father to the care of relations, Leach dreamed of escaping Bristol. That wish was realised when, aged 14, he was expelled from school for "inattentiveness, irresponsibility and incorrigibility", and won a place in a travelling troupe of acrobats, Bob Pender's Nippy Nine Burlesque Rehearsal. Famous for its stilt-walking routines, Pender's troupe - in which the naturally athletic (and already six-foot-plus) Leach soon made an impact - was a regular on the British music-hall circuit, but in 1920 transferred to America. When, after two years of touring, Pender decided to return to Britain, the 18-year-old Leach chose to remain in New York.

It took Leach five years of scraping a living as an acrobat, straight-man, cinema dancer and gigolo before a string of well-reviewed roles in Broadway musicals led to a screen test for Paramount Studios. Although the verdict on Leach was not promising - his neck was too thick, his legs too bowed and his face too podgy - he was given a bit part in a short film. This was all the prompting he needed, and in January 1932 he moved to Hollywood. It was the right decision. Within weeks, Leach had a new name - Cary Grant (dreamt up over dinner with Fay Wray, the King Kong star) - and a five-year deal with Paramount. He also bought his first dog and named it Archie Leach.

Cary Grant could not have timed things better. Paramount, whose only male star, Gary Cooper, was on sabbatical in Africa and threatening to retire, was looking for a new leading man and saw star potential in Grant. So did the critics. In fact, the reviews of Grant's first film - mistakenly hailing the arrival of Gary Grant, but correctly assessing him as a "femme rave" - were enough to convince Cooper to return in a hurry. Soon, despite Cooper's attempts to put him in his place, Grant was starring alongside the female pantheon: Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Tallulah Bankhead.

Although the studio billed Grant as "the Ultimate ladies' man", from the first the gossip columns questioned his sexuality. That the notoriously parsimonious Grant shared a house with another actor, Randolph Scott, did nothing to stem this talk. Much to the irritation of Paramount's publicity department, and at least one of his five wives, Grant continued his un-usually close friendship with Scott for the next 11 years.

Whatever the truth - and Marc Eliot's evidence does not always convince - it had little effect on Grant's meteoric career. By 1936, he felt sufficiently well-established to risk becoming a star without a studio, a move that had proved career suicide for those who had previously attempted it. Grant, however, went from one triumph to another. For the rest of his life he was resented by the studio moguls for precipitating the end of the contract system.

While Grant's professional life was characterised only by success, his personal life was largely a failure. Although he was both kind and a man of integrity where friendship was concerned, four of his marriages ended quickly and acrimoniously. Throughout his life, he was plagued by depression; something he tried to alleviate through hard drinking and, in later years, taking LSD. In truth, Grant had never got over his mother's sudden death when he was ten; he was equally floored by the discovery, 20 years later, that she had not died at all, but was living in the mental asylum to which she had been committed after only a mild nervous breakdown.

Eliot's book claims to "reveal the man behind the movie star" but, as it proves impossible to separate Archibald Leach from Cary Grant, his biography swiftly becomes mere filmography. Even Grant, it seems, found it hard to distinguish between his two personae. Late in life, he would say: "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."

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