On Nov. 29, 1986, Cary Grant died in the city of Davenport at the age of 82. Grant was a star of stage, screen and that one image of him running away from a crop duster that shows up in every #menswear blog at one point or another.
He was preparing a one-man show at the Adler Theatre called A Conversation with Cary Grant, featuring clips from his most iconic movies. Grant had just made it through rehearsal that Saturday when he began to feel unwell. An hour later, he was so ill that he had to cancel the appearance, and after getting rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital in a comatose state, passed away before the day was out. Doctors determined that he had died of a massive stroke.
Grant was the quintessential Handsome Man of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, often co-starring with four-time Best Actress winner and fellow virtuoso of the mid-Atlantic accent Katharine Hepburn. A true rags-to-riches tale, he moved to the States from Bristol, England at the age of 16, getting his start in vaudeville. He’d go on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1941, then again in 1944.
Later, he starred in several iconic Hitchcock movies, including To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959, in which he runs, well dressed, from a crop duster). He was also at one point a prolific user of LSD — so prolific, in fact, that when Carrie Fisher’s mother found out that she was also using LSD, she put her in touch with Grant. They would subsequently bond over a mutual hatred of Chevy Chase, a popular pastime of Chase acquaintances for the better part of 60 years.
In an interview with the Quad-City Times a week before his death, Grant joked that he was “[highly regarded] because [he had] lived so long and didn’t kick the cat.”
“One day people will read that I’m gone and then they can pass the cudgel to Jimmy Stewart. He’s getting up here, too,” he added.
But it seemed the star’s impact was deeper than that; cardiologist James Gilson, one of the doctors who had tried to save his life in Davenport, spoke to it that fateful night.
“Guys like Cary Grant are supposed to live forever,” he said.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
