EXCLUSIVE: When Cary Grant met wife number four: Moment movie legend laid eyes on Dyan Cannon is recreated for new ITV series Archie

It was the second when Hollywood display screen legend Cary Grant first set eyes on the lady who would change into his fourth spouse Dyan Cannon.

As he sat in his drawing room in Palm Springs, California, watching the 1961 TV sequence Malibu Run, the 57-year-old actor, noticed a 24-year-old blonde in a pink gingham bikini.

Having wooed her for 4 years, she lastly agreed to change into his spouse, and the couple went on to have a daughter Jennifer, in 1966. However the marriage was acrimonious and the couple had been divorced two years later.

Now, a brand new ITV sequence Archie, primarily based on Cannon’s biography ‘Expensive Cary’ and Jennifer’s memoir ‘Good Stuff’, explores the connection between silver display screen’s main man and the ingénue 33 years his junior.

Starring Harry Potter star Jason Isaacs as Grant, and Gavin and Stacey actress Laura Aikman as Cannon, the four-part sequence intersperses scenes from Grant’s tragic childhood – his start identify was Archibald Leach – with episodes from his later life.

It contrasts the poverty of his upbringing in Bristol, after the loss of life of his older brother John, the abandonment of his father Elias, and his mom Elsie’s committal in a psychological asylum, together with his luxurious way of life in America.

By the point Cannon met Grant, he was already a significant film star, having appeared alongside Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and Sophia Loren in Houseboat. Their first date was on the set of the Doris Day movie That Contact of Mink.

It was a tricky problem for Aikman, 37, to play somebody a decade youthful than her, whom she had admired since she was a teen within the hit TV sequence Ally McBeal.

‘My make-up artist Jess Bass would put this silicon-based product on beneath my basis which made my pores and skin look actually clear,’ she mentioned in an unique interview with the Mail on Sunday.

Equally, she needed to squeeze into costumes from the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, when girls had been extra petite. ‘They had been fairly tiny,’ she provides.

‘I am an avid health club goer and I am in all probability the smallest I’ve ever been.

‘However I did pop a button about two months in. We needed to have fairly a number of pairs of capris made as a result of we could not discover any that match. They’d not even go over my bum.’

Costume designer Annie Hardinge, who labored on the Helena Bonham Carter present Nolly, sourced roughly 50 outfits for Laura, becoming her at costumiers Cosprop and Carlo Manzi.

She additionally created 15 of Cannon’s most iconic outfits together with the pale blue costume that she wore the primary time she met Grant on the Common set and the Chanel go well with which she wore in London in 1966.

Earlier than her audition, Aikman watched hours of interviews with Cannon, her movies, and listened to her podcasts. Her favorite was the Johnny Carson Present. ‘I used to be obsessive about Ally McBeal as a teen,’ she smiles.

Afterwards they spent hours chatting. ‘She as soon as Face-timed me from her walk-in wardrobe whereas she was placing on her knee-high boots to go to a LA Laker’s recreation,’ laughs Aikman. She checked out me in a hoody in my mattress and went: “Do you want trend Laura?”‘

But it surely was the hair and make-up which took time. ‘It is the very first thing I’ve labored on the place the lead actor was in make-up so long as the lead actress,’ smiles Aikman, who’s married to actor Matt Kennard.

‘Jason and I might be subsequent to one another within the make-up chair for about two hours each morning and we used to play Guess That Tune whereas I had my wigs fitted and he had his prosthetic chin.’

So, how was her efficiency obtained by Cannon? ‘She’s very complimentary,’ provides Aikman. ‘The factor she at all times says is “Laura bought my coronary heart,” which is the essential factor.’

Archie is screened on ITV on Thursday (November 23).