His only child, Jennifer, was born in February of that year, when Grant was sixty-two. Fatherhood had come to him late, in his fourth marriage and four decades into a career. She was a few months old when the film reached cinemas. Grant decided he would be present for her childhood in a way that shooting schedules would make impossible, and the decision turned out to be absolute. He never altered the schedule of her visits or missed one. He arranged his board duties at Fabergé and elsewhere to work around his time with her. He called her his best production, and he meant it as the plain truth rather than a line.

The version of Cary Grant audiences loved was a construction he had worked on since the early thirties. The accent, sitting somewhere between his Bristol origins and a transatlantic finish refined over years of careful listening. The walk, the timing, the particular self-amusement that marked his romantic leads. None of it was accidental. Grant had assembled the character with the dedication of a man building a major commercial property, which is what it had become, and he understood that the property needed constant maintenance to stay plausible on screen.

What he also understood was that the maintenance had grown exhausting in a way no fee could justify. The roles waiting for him in his sixties asked him to play the same man he had played in his forties, opposite actresses chosen to flatter the illusion that nothing had changed. Grant looked at the trajectory and wanted no part of it.

What unsettled Hollywood was the completeness of it. Grant did not slide into character roles. He wrote no memoir and did not return to the screen for any sum. He accepted an honorary Oscar in 1970 and the Kennedy Center Honours a decade later, then went back to his private life each time. He gave a handful of interviews across the next twenty years and otherwise conducted himself, with a consistency observers found either admirable or perverse depending on their stake in it, as a man whose acting career had simply ended and was not worth discussing at length.

He spent the decades that followed on the Fabergé board, raising his daughter, watching baseball, and guarding a private life he had found almost impossible to protect during the working years. The retirement was, in the plainest sense, what he wanted.

What Grant had grasped was that a constructed public persona has a finite working life, and what sets the limit is the coherence of the persona. Audience appetite outlasts it by years. Audiences would have kept turning up for another fifteen. The character would have aged on screen, tipped into the slightly ridiculous, and settled finally into the elder-statesman parts that ageing leading men of his generation accepted as their natural end. Grant saw the whole arc and declined to walk it.

There is a particular wisdom in knowing when a thing has reached its natural conclusion. The signal is rarely loud. Most men continue well past it, because the inertia of an income, an identity, a set of arrangements already in place is easier to ride than the work of building whatever comes next. Grant had the rare combination of self-knowledge and money required to act on the signal the moment he caught it.

From inside the industry, the retirement looked like a refusal of opportunity. From any distance at all, it reads now as the most considered decision of his career.