Farley Granger, star for Hitchcock
Farley Granger, 85, the 1950s bobby sox screen idol who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classics Rope and Strangers on a Train, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan.
NEW YORK - Farley Granger, 85, the 1950s bobby sox screen idol who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classics Rope and Strangers on a Train, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan.
He died of natural causes, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner's office.
Granger was an overnight Hollywood success story. He was a 16-year-old student at North Hollywood High School when he got the notion that he wanted to act and joined a little theater group.
Talent scouts for movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn saw the handsome youngster and signed him to a contract. His first movie was The North Star in 1943, a World War II story that starred Anne Baxter and Dana Andrews.
"It was one of those miracle careers," he said. "I had no talent and no training whatsoever and suddenly I was thrown ... [in] with Walter Huston, Erich von Stroheim, Anne Baxter, Ann Harding, and Walter Brennan."
A decade later, at the height of his Hollywood stardom, he walked away from it to learn his craft. He spent the rest of his career in a mix of movies, television, and stage work.
Granger was born on July 1, 1925, in San Jose, Calif., where his father was a car dealer. The business went bust during the Depression and in 1933 the family moved to Los Angeles, where he was subsequently spotted.
His career halted for Navy service during World War II - "I was chronically seasick." But when he was mustered out, he returned to Hollywood and the Goldwyn publicity machine.
Fan magazines ran pictures of Granger in swim trunks cavorting with such stars as Debbie Reynolds, Ann Blyth, and Jane Powell. But he said the only serious romance he had with a woman was with Shelley Winters. His lifelong romance with Winters was "very much a love affair."
A briefer affair with Ava Gardner began when both quarreled with their dates at a Hollywood Christmas party.
In the 2007 memoir Include Me Out, written with his partner Robert Calhoun, Granger said he was bisexual. For a time, he lived with Arthur Laurents, writer of the stage and movie versions of West Side Story and Gypsy. In New York, Granger said, he had a two-night fling with Leonard Bernstein.
Granger made Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951. Beside the two Hitchcock thrillers, Granger appeared in They Live by Night, Roseanna McCoy, Side Street, The Story of Three Loves, Edge of Doom, and Hans Christian Andersen.