image". Stanley Donen stated that his real "magic" came from his attention to minute details and always seeming real, which came from "enormous amounts of work" rather than being God-given. Grant remarked of his career: "I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person, or he became me". He professed that the real Cary Grant was more like his scruffy, unshaven fisherman in Father Goose than the "well-tailored charmer" of Charade. Grant often poked fun at himself with statements such as, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant—even I want to be Cary Grant", and in ad-lib lines such as in His Girl Friday (1940): "Listen, the last man who said that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat." In Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), a gravestone is seen bearing the name Archie Leach. Alfred Hitchcock thought that Grant was very effective in darker roles, with a mysterious, dangerous quality, remarking that "there is a frightening side to Cary that no one can quite put their finger on". Wansell notes that this darker, mysterious side extended to his personal life, which he took great lengths to cover up in order to retain his debonair image. Legacy Biographers Morecambe and Stirling believe that Cary Grant was the "greatest leading man Hollywood had ever known". Schickel stated that there are "very few stars who achieve the magnitude of Cary Grant, art of a very high and subtle order" and thought that he was the "best star actor there ever was in the movies". David Thomson and directors Stanley Donen and Howard Hawks concurred that Grant was the greatest and most important actor in the history of the cinema. He was a favorite of Hitchcock, who admired him and called him "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life", and remained one of Hollywood's top box-office attractions for almost 30 years. Pauline Kael stated that the World still thinks of him affectionately because he "embodies what seems a happier time−a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer". Grant was nominated for Academy Awards for Penny Serenade (1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), but he never won a competitive Oscar. He did, however, receive a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in