Cary Grant was not supposed to die. Sure, we all knew he was getting on - he had the silver hair to prove it - and that his last movie was 20 years behind him.

But die? Never. Cary Grant was supposed to stick around, our perpetual touchstone of charm and elegance and romance and youth.

He will always stick around, in a sense. We can still see him con Rosalind Russell out of a husband and Katharine Hepburn out of her considerable wits. We can see him kiss Ingrid Bergman, and we can see Grace Kelly kiss him, and we can see the look on his face when he finds out what his aunts have hidden in the window seat. But we can never see him again without feeling a little pang, for now the substance behind that extraordinary shadow is gone.

Ah, the images he leaves behind. He is suave in white tie and tails and ludicrous in a negligee and the very image of an absent-minded professor when he climbs a ladder to tend his dinosaur. His double-takes are straight out of the silents, his antics straight out of the music halls and his looks straight out of the story books. He leaves a voice behind, too . . . an accent, anyway. Like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, his great contemporaries, he is easy to imitate and impossible to replace.

He also was - is - easy to love. Yes, the haircut is perfect and so is the suit and that cleft in the chin is heaven's thumbmark. But they don't explain why three generations of women had crushes on him. Apart from being gorgeous, the adjective of many women's choice, he is also a friend. Cary Grant's promise is of more than one glorious night; it's of a lifetime of laughter.