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Archibald Alec Leach was born in Bristol, England at the turn of the century, January 18, 1904 to a tailor and a seamstress.
A theatrical tour of NYC led him to emigrate at the ripe old age of 16, where he became a vaudeville song and dance man on the same circuit as the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and Ted Healy and his Stooges.
Moving to Hollywood at the height of the Depression, he wound up cast as handsome young men and rich playboys in a handful of Marlene Dietrich and Mae West films, the latter of which elevated him to leading man status.
But it wasn’t until the rise of the screwball comedy that he truly made his mark, starring in several of the best known entries thereof. A long run of similar if, by the late forties, increasingly inferior efforts was salvaged by four well regarded films for the great Alfred Hitchcock, which subverted his image in favor of a darker, more realistic persona.