Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

For three decades in the middle of the 20th century, Carrie Grant was a bonafide Hollywood

icon, a sex symbol, money-making machine and the epitome of deben-air sophistication.

Yet his formative years in pre-war Bristol were marred by poverty and his mother's mental

illness.

Mark Glancy's new book, Carrie Grant, The Making of a Hollywood Legend, traces this remarkable

transformation.

Here, in conversation with our production editor Spencer Misen, Mark discusses the life

of one of Britain's greatest ever-acting exports.

So Mark, as your point is at the very beginning of your book, Carrie Grant declared in 1984

that quote unquote, I definitely don't trust the biographies.

So with that in mind, what inspired you to write well about him yourself?

What is it about him that you find so compelling?

Well, I suppose two things.

One is that I lived in Bristol when I was a postgraduate student and I saw where he was

from and was quite surprised to find out that he was from such a humble background, he's

from a very working-class family and neighborhood.

So a lot of my interest was about how he got to be Carrie Grant.

How do you go from being relatively uneducated working-class boy in 1910 to being the most

sophisticated glamorous, devinar man in the universe just two decades later?

...