Jennifer, both in her memoir and in all the interviews she has given, is full of praise for her father. “OK, I was a little in love with Dad. Ok, I had more than a little crush on Dad,” she wrote. A completely reciprocal love: for 20 years, he almost obsessively preserved and archived all the memories they shared (drawings, photos, personal videos, souvenirs…), probably driven by the awareness that time together is counted because of his already advanced age. It is this acute collection that will provide Jennifer with the material necessary to write her book.
“He wanted me to have accurate records of my life with him, as his memories were burned after the Bristol bombing [la ville britannique où il est né et a grandi] during World War II,” she explained to NPR in 2011. “He recorded tapes, videos, took photos and kept all the letters and little notes that we wrote to each other in boxes, which he then stored in a fireproof room in our house. »
Jennifer was still a student at Stanford when Cary Grant died in 1986 in Davenport, Iowa, at the age of 82, of a heart attack, during a theater tour across the United States where he talks about his career and answers questions from the audience. Of his $60 million personal fortune, half went to his late wife, Barbara Harris, and the other half to his daughter.
Jennifer Grant, at the premiere of the film Going Shopping (in which she stars) in Los Angeles in 2005.
Michael Tran Archive/Getty Images
The latter could therefore have afforded to remain idle, but once she graduated, she joined a law firm, then became a chef in one of the restaurants of star chef Wolfgang Puck. And even though her father repeatedly said he didn’t want her to get into acting, seven years after his death, Jennifer made her acting debut on the small screen in Beverly Hills, one of the most popular series of the 90s, where she played Celeste Lundy, the girlfriend of Steve Sander (Ian Ziering), for eight episodes. We then come across her in various series of the time, such as Ellen, Walker Texas Ranger and especially Friends : in the first season, she plays Nina, a work colleague of Chandler (Matthew Perry) whom he has to fire without succeeding. Of course he ends up dating her.
