Sylvia Scarlett
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sylvia Scarlett is a 1935 romantic comedy film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, based on a novel by Compton MacKenzie, directed by George Cukor, and notorious as one of the most famous unsuccessful movies of the 1930's. Hepburn plays the title role of Sylvia Scarlett, a female con artist masquerading as a boy to escape the police. The success of the subterfuge is in large part due to the skillful transformation of Hepburn by RKO make-up artist Mel Berns.
This film was the first pairing of Grant and Hepburn, who later starred together in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Cary Grant's performance as dashing rogue incorporates him using a Cockney accent and remains widely considered the first time Grant's famous personality began to register on film. (The only other film in which Grant used the Cockney accent is Clifford Odets' None but the Lonely Heart nine years later.) Cockney was not however Cary Grant's original accent. He was born and grew up in Bristol which has a very different accent to London.
