The time Cary Grant invented the Muller Fruit Corner

Cary Grant loved yoghurt above anything else.

The golden-age movie star was a stylish and sophisticated presence at Hollywood parties and enjoyed the company of beautiful woman and witty men, but when the party was over Grant would like nothing more than to settle down on the sofa with a small pot of yoghurt before bed.

“Mr Grant was a marvellous actor,” said legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, with whom Grant worked on many occasions.

“But I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who consumed so much yoghurt.”

Grant is rightly celebrated for roles in classics like An Affair to Remember, His Girl Friday, and To Catch a Thief, but what many people don’t know that he always considered his greatest achievement to be his invention of the Muller Fruit Corner.

“Oh, I don’t think I ever saw Cary as pleased with himself,” said Katherine Hepburn in a 1975 Wogan interview.

“We were working on Bringing Up Baby, you understand.

“Well, Cary came in one morning grinning from ear to ear like the proverbial cat who’d got the proverbial canary.

“I said to him, ‘Cary, whatever are you so happy about?’ And he showed me.

“It was a strange apparatus that consisted of two pots, one smaller than the other, stuck together. One contained yoghurt, the other jam. ‘I’m going to call it a Muller Fruit Corner,’ he said. Well, I just laughed.”

“He took it to the yoghurt companies, though, and most thought the idea crazy. A separate pot for the jam? Why not simply mix it together?”

One company could see the potential, though. The Wyoming Processed Milk Product Corporation.

In a show of faith in Grant’s product, they changed their name to Muller and went into business with the North by Northwest star.

“Heavens, now they’re everywhere,” laughed Hepburn.

“I can’t go to the store without seeing a Muller Fruit Corner and thinking of my friend Cary.”

Sadly, Grant never received the credit he deserved amongst the wider public for his impressive yoghurt work.

“It’s sad really,” said Screen Idle proprietor and properly serious film historian Neil Tollfree.

“I mean you can’t move for people banging on about Hedy Lamarr inventing WiFi, but Cary Grant’s contribution to yoghurt and fruit products seems lost to history.”

Despite the awards and plaudits for one of the greatest Hollywood careers of all time, friends say that Cary Grant’s proudest moment was in 1954, receiving a special award for ‘yoghurt innovation’ from the Yoghurt, Cheese, and Miscellaneous Dairy Products industry awards.

A fitting tribute.