Stewart Granger

<The Times, August 18, 1993>

STEWART GRANGER

Stewart Granger, actor, died of cancer in Los Angeles, on August 16
aged 80. He was born in London on May 6, 1913.

SMOULDERING good looks, a 6ft 2ins physique and a nimble athleticism
brought Stewart Granger film stardom playing swashbuckling romantic or
villainous leads in a clutch of costume dramas in the postwar years.
His starring roles in "The Man in Grey", "Fanny by Gaslight", "King
Solomon's Mines", "Scaramouche" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" led him to
being dubbed "the English Douglas Fairbanks".

For a while – along with Michael Wilding, James Mason and David Niven
– he was one of the most sought after British film actors and one of
the top ten money-spinners in the film business. Over a quarter of a
century from 1943 he made at least one, usually two, occasionally
three – and once four – films a year. But many of the productions in
which he starred were mediocre and, later, Granger was the first to
admit that, although he made more than 50 films, he never realised his
full potential as an actor.

He was a rumbustious and abrasive individual, thrice married and
divorced and given to a devil-may-care outspokenness which never
endeared him to either fellow actors, directors or studio bosses. But
he was also extremely self-deprecating about his career and blamed his
failureto make more of his opportunities mostly on his own inept
decisions. "I've seldom, if ever, made a film I have really liked or
been proud of" he told one interviewer in 1968. "To spend a life
making even reasonable films is bad enough, but to spend one, as I
have, making terrible ones, tends to be a little dispiriting."

He would probably have won more critical acclaim if he had not been
persuaded, first in Britain and then in the United States, to sign
long-term contracts that forced him to appear in too many mediocre
films. Blessed as he was with debonair handsomeness, a commanding
presence and a manner that could be supremely suave or sardonic,
Granger exuded old-style Hollywood stardom.

Stewart Granger was the son of an army officer, and brought up in
Polperro, Cornwall. His real name was James Lablache Stewart, which he
was obliged to change to avoid being confused with the Hollywood actor
James Stewart, but he remained Jimmy to his friends. Following school
at Epsom College, his first ambition was to forge a career in medicine
but this was thwarted when a change in the family's financial
circumstances led him to abandon his studies and to look for other
outlets. After a spell as a salesman for a bell-punch company he
decided to try for work as a film extra.

That gave him a taste for acting and he trained at the Webber-Douglas
drama school. His first professional job was in repertory at Hull; he
later moved to Birmingham Rep and, in 1936, to the Malvern Festival.
His first London stage appearance was as Captain Hamilton in "The Sun
Never Sets" at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1938 and the following year
he joined the Old Vic Company under Tyrone Guthrie. He played
alongside Robert Donat, as Anderson to Donat's Dick Dudgeon in "The
Devil's Disciple" and as Tybalt to his Romeo. He also had small parts
in films but his film career did not take off until he was invalided
out of the Black Watch in the middle of the Second World War.

Robert Donat recommended Granger to Gainsborough Pictures, who gave
him a part in a 1943 costume melodrama "The Man in Grey", set in
Regency times, the film – which featured Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis
Calvert – caught the imagination of the war-weary public and thrust
Granger into the limelight. Against the advice of Donat, Granger
signed a seven-year contract with Gainsborough, which was later
absorbed by the Rank Organization.

He soon became second only to James Mason as the British cinema's
biggest box-office draw. Of his films of the period, "Waterloo Road"
(1944) was a rare but effective venture into contemporary drama and he
supported Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains in the disastrously
extravagant "Caesar and Cleopatra" (1945) from the play by G.B. Shaw.
But he was more characteristically cast in such pictures as "Fanny by
Gaslight" (1943), "Love Story" (1944), "Captain Boycott" (1947) and
"Saraband for Dead Lovers" (1948).

Granger's relations with the press were never easy and they reached
their nadir when the gossip columnists made hay of his friendship with
an actress 15 years his junior, Jean Simmons. (His first marriage to
the actress Elspeth March, had ended in divorce in 1949.) After losing
most of their money producing a Russian play, "The Power of Darkness",
in an unsuccessful theatre venture in London, Granger and Simmons took
off for Hollywood and were married at Tucson, Arizona, in December,
1950. Fairly desperate for work, Granger agreed to star in "King
Solomon's Mines", a 1950 version of the Rider Haggard novel
co-starring Deborah Kerr, and on the strength of its success signed
another seven-year contract with its producers MGM.

The studio supplied a ready stream of vehicles to exploit his talent
for sword-play and riding, even if most of them were inferior re-makes
of previous films. They included "Scaramouche" (1952) - a French
Revolutionary tale featuring GRanger in a swordfight which, at six and
a half minutes, in credited with being the longest in cinema history -
"The Prisoner of Zenda" (1952) (as Rassendyll), and "Beau Brummel"
(1954). Fritz Lang's version of the smuggling story, "Moonfleet"
(1955), was a far better, if less popular, picture and Granger also
appeared to good effect in "Bhowani Junction" (1956), set in imperial
India, "The Last Hunt" (1956), a Western with Robert Taylor, and in
1960, a roistering gold rush adventure, "North to Alaska" opposite
John Wayne.

In 1956 he became a US citizen but after six years he reverted to
British nationality. His marriage to Jean Simmons was dissolved in
1960 and by this time his career was on the wane. Granger had gained a
reputation for declining to laugh at the bad jokes of producers and
for putting up none-too-gracefully with directors he regarded as
ill-skilled.

He spent the early 1960s filming on the Continent: there was a
Biblical epic, "Sodom and Gomorrah" (1962), and a surprising
successful series of German "Westerns" made in Yugoslavia and based on
the Karl May stories. But other continental ventures came to little
and Granger virtually abandoned the cinema for American television
where he joined the nine-year old Western series, "The Virginian"
(re-titled "The Men from Shiloh") and played Sherlock Holmes in "The
Hound of the Baskervilles".

His third marriage in 1964 to a 22-year-old Belgian beauty queen,
Caroline Lecerf, ended in 1969 and he devoted his professional
energies to playing the property market in Arizona and Spain.

Granger's business acumen was no better in real estate than it was in
films however and he was forced, for financial reasons, to continue
acting in such television series as "Loveboat", even taking a modest
role playing Prince Philip in one of the more excruciating American
television "faction" productions, "The Royal Romance of Charles and
Diana." He returned to the cinema screen after a ten year gap in 1978,
supporting Richard Burton and Richard Harris in a story about
mercenaries called "The Wild Geese." Granger, by this time
silver-haired 65, played a suave corrupt merchant banker. After this
his health, if not his looks, was in decline. He had part of a lung
removed in 1981 and in the same year published his autobiography
"Sparks Fly Upwards".

It had always been a matter of regret to Granger that he had not made
more of his stage career and in 1990 he returned to the boards after a
40 year absence, appearing on Broadway with fellow veterans Rex
Harrison and Glynis Johns in the Somerset Maugham play, "The Circle."
Later in the same year, following the deaths of his two co-stars, he
toured Britain with the play along side Ian Carmichael and Rosemary
Harris.

Stewart Granger is survived by three daughters and a son.

END