Cary

[poliphilo]

Cary sounds like a girl's name. How on earth did it end up attached to one of the icons of Hollywood masculinity?

Is it a shortening of Oscar?

Or a surname- like Nelson or Shirley- reused as a forename?

Or simply the invention of a wool-gathering Hollywood publicist?

Was Archibald Leach the first Cary or are there earlier examples? Wikipedia doesn't know of any. 

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

IMDB says "Paramount Studios named him Cary Grant while he began his film career, because the similarity of the name to Gary Cooper, their biggest male star, (C.G. being an inversion of G.C.) and possibly because Clark Gable had the same initials."

It hadn't sounded like a girl's name to me (until you said that, and now of course Cary / Carrie seems quite obvious). To the extent I'd thought of it at all, I suppose I'd thought of it as a surname, and therefore a boy's name. Searching, I don't find it as a surname (not with that spelling, anyway) but as a place name, which is the next step along the logic chain.

What an interesting question. And the follow-up is, if Cary Grant was the first Cary, was he followed by others? It doesn't seem to have caught on, does it?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Fascinating.

The only more recent Cary I can think of is the English actor Cary Elwes (b 1962)- whose given names are Ivan Simon Cary Elwes.