Stage and Screen Veteran Farley Granger Dies at Age 85

Farley Granger, who moved from early movie stardom in a pair of Alfred Hitchcock films to an active career on the stage, died on March 27 at his New York City home of natural causes, according to the Associated Press. He was 85.

Born on July 1, 1925, in San Jose, California, Granger moved with his family to Los Angeles during the Depression and was spotted by a talent scout for Samuel Goldwyn while still in his teens. An instant screen idol after his 1943 debut in The North Star, he was tapped by Alfred Hitchcock for the now-classic thrillers Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951) and played a bank robber in Nicholas Ray's debut film They Live By Night (1949). Frustrated by his lack of training as an actor, Granger bought out his Goldwyn contract in the mid-1950s and moved to New York, where he studied with Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner.

Granger made his New York stage debut in 1955 in the short-lived The Carefree Tree and played Mr. Darcy in First Impressions, a 1960 Broadway musical version of Pride and Prejudice. He went on to appear in Broadway revivals of The Seagull, The Crucible and The Glass Menagerie and was part of a repertory company formed by Eva Le Gallienne. Granger’s final Broadway appearance was in 1981 as novelist Sidney Bruhl in the long-running thriller Deathtrap. In 1986, he won an Obie Award for his performance in Lanford Wilson’s Talley & Son at Circle Repertory Company.

In later years, Granger, who never married, appeared in New York-based soap operas such as As the World Turns and One Life to Live, for which he received a Daytime Emmy nomination. But he always favored the stage. "I feel I'm much more relaxed in front of an audience than a camera,” an Associated Press obituary quoted him as saying. “I feel the response. The live audience really turns me on and I like it.”