Is George Clooney the new Cary Grant?
If George Clooney is to be the new Cary Grant, writes David Thomson, he’d better stop being so pleased with himself and leave the Vegas romps behind. We all love movie stars, and the very idea of them. But sometimes we get the notion that it is harder to be a “true star” now than it was. We may note that Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Laurence Olivier and John Wayne were all born in 1907. Take the first decade of the 20th century, and nearly every “great star” was born in that span. Why should that be? And, more especially, if it is a provable fact and an observable condition, what has happened to movie stars now? Is it possible that George Clooney is the new Cary Grant? I like Clooney; I revere Grant. I wrote in 1975 that he was “the most important actor the movies have ever had”. Of course, he had stopped working by then. Grant had made his last picture, Walk, Don’t Run, in 1966, when he was 62. He was esteemed by 1975, but what I wrote was still widely considered impetuous and
