Clooney and Grant considered

Is George Clooney the new Cary Grant? - Film - Entertainment - theage.com.au

While on the topic of Hollywood, this Age article (reprinted from The Guardian) is an interesting comparison between Clooney and Cary Grant. (And it looks cynically at what passes for Hollywood stardom these days.)

I can't say I have spent much time considering Grant's appeal before, but this seems true:

You see, North By Northwest is the kind of vehicle that enabled stars to exist. By the standards that function today - by the standards of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck - it is a great film, an entertainment that turns into a moral tale.

Time and again, the apparently "easy-going" Grant found himself in stories in which his character had to make up or to change his mind. That was hardly accidental. It was the self-awareness of a man who was himself a constant worrier - and who had "lost" his mother in a quite remarkable way. One day she was there in Bristol; the next she was gone. It was more than 20 years before he learned the awful truth.

The article doesn't tell us what happened. Wikipedia to the rescue again:

An only child, he had a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother Elsie (who had apparently never overcome her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy), was placed by his father in a mental institution when Archie was ten. His father (who had a son with another woman) told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.

Sad, hey. The whole Wikipedia entry about Grant is interesting. He had issues of all sorts, it seems.