His dark good looks fit nicely with the romance-infused light operas popular in New York theater

Self-trained English actor Archie Leach pulled off the role of a lifetime: becoming Hollywood legend Cary Grant. Why the child of a broken family hid behind the silver screen’s definition of easy charm and handsome masculinity is another story entirely.

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Despite a heyday more than a half-century ago, his best films wear so well because the appeal of Cary Grant defies time — screwball comedies like “Bringing Up Baby” and “His Girl Friday,” romances like “The Philadelphia Story” and “An Affair to Remember,” the adventure “Gunga Din” or any of his four Alfred Hitchcock films, particularly “Notorious” and “North By Northwest.”

Grant turned his celluloid charm into a public persona, but it didn’t come naturally. As Eyman explains, young Archie Leach endured an impoverished childhood in his native Bristol, England, his father a negligent drinker who placed the 11-year-old’s mother in an asylum while telling him she had died.

In his teens, Archie found solace in the local music hall, the hustle and bustle behind the curtain and the familial nature of putting on a show. Eventually he left school to join a troupe of tumblers and traveled the English countryside, in time sailing to America and working in vaudeville, all the while honing a sense of how to make people laugh.

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His dark good looks fit nicely with the romance-infused light operas popular in New York theater. Then Hollywood came calling. In 1932, the year he turned 28, he appeared in his first feature film, with a new name that helped him bury his roots ever deeper. More than two dozen roles built up his romantic and comedic chops until 1937′s “Topper” and “The Awful Truth” sent his career into a stratosphere it never left.