- Born
- Died
- Birth nameFarley Earle Granger II
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- Farley Earle Granger was born in 1925 in San Jose, California, to Eva
(Hopkins) and Farley Earle Granger, who owned an automobile dealership.
Right out of high school, he was brought to the attention of movie
producer Samuel Goldwyn, who cast him in
a small role in
The North Star (1943). He followed
it up with a much bigger part in
The Purple Heart (1944) and then
joined the army. After his release he had to wait until
Nicholas Ray cast him in the
low-budget RKO classic
They Live by Night (1948) with
Cathy O'Donnell, and then he was
recalled by Goldwyn, who signed him to a five-year contract. He then
made Rope (1948) for
Alfred Hitchcock and followed
up for Goldwyn with
Enchantment (1948) with
David Niven,
Evelyn Keyes and
Teresa Wright. Other roles
followed, including
Roseanna McCoy (1949) with
Joan Evans,
Our Very Own (1950) with
Ann Blyth and
Side Street (1949), again with Cathy
O'Donnell. He returned to Hitchcock for the best role of his career, as
the socialite tennis champ embroiled in a murder plot by psychotic
Robert Walker in
Strangers on a Train (1951).
He then appeared in O. Henry's Full House (1952)
with Jeanne Crain,
Hans Christian Andersen (1952)
with Danny Kaye,
The Story of Three Loves (1953)
with Leslie Caron and
Small Town Girl (1953) with
Jane Powell. He went to Italy to
make Senso (1954) for
Luchino Visconti with
Alida Valli, one of his best films. He did a
Broadway play in 1955, "The Carefree Tree", and then returned to films
in The Naked Street (1955) with
Anthony Quinn and
Anne Bancroft and
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955)
with Joan Collins and
Ray Milland. Over the next ten years Granger
worked extensively on television and the stage, mainly in stock, and
returned to films in
Rogue's Gallery (1968) with
Dennis Morgan. He then returned to
Italy, where he made a series of films, including
The Challengers (1970)
with 'Anne Baxter (I)',
The Man Called Noon (1973)
with Richard Crenna and
Arnold (1973) with
Stella Stevens. More recent films
include The Prowler (1981),
Death Mask (1984),
The Imagemaker (1986) and
The Next Big Thing (2001).
Since the 1950s he has continued to work frequently on American
television and, in 1980, returned to Broadway and appeared in
Ira Levin's successful play "Deathtrap". In
2007 he published his autobiography, "Include Me Out: My Life from
Goldwyn to Broadway" with
Robert Calhoun. A longtime
resident of New York, Granger has recently appeared in several
documentaries discussing Hollywood and, often, specifically
Alfred Hitchcock.- IMDb Mini Biography By: alfiehitchie (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- ParentsFarley Earle Granger Sr.Eva Hopkins
- In his book "Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood," playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents detailed his live-in relationship with Granger during the 1940s and '50s. Laurents and Granger were already romantically involved when Laurents wrote the screenplay for Rope (1948), in which Granger co-starred.
- On the audio commentary for They Live by Night (1948), he says that Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray were the best directors he ever worked with. In addition, his two favorite films of his own are Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and Ray's They Live by Night (1948).
- (1944-45) Served in US Navy during WW II.
- His longtime partner (since 1963), Robert Calhoun, collaborated with Farley on his 2007 memoir "Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to
Broadway". - One of the last of Samuel Goldwyn's contract players.
- [about films] I love to see them. I just don't like to make them.
- I have never felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining or special group. I find it difficult to answer questions about "'gay life" in Hollywood when I was living and working there. There were, of course, gay cliques, but I had no close friends who belonged to any of them, and I had no desire to become involved with any of them . . . I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone.
- I was very lucky when I first started. I had [Nicholas Ray] and before that Lewis Milestone, and I was a kid and very naive, with no training at all. They really took care of me. And then I began to get directors who weren't as good as [Ray and Milestone] were, and I soon realized I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I'd better find out because I could no longer trust this sort of father symbol of the director anymore. In those days you were a movie star or you were a Broadway actor, and movie stars weren't considered actors. So I couldn't call myself an actor unless I worked in the theater for any length of time.
- [on leaving the Samuel Goldwyn after Hans Christian Andersen (1952)] I finally bought my contract from him. Couldn't stand working for him anymore, and I just wanted to work in the theater for a bit. I didn't want to be a movie star. I didn't think it was my place in life. It took all the money I had in the world, and I had a wonderful agent then, Charles Feldman [Charles K. Feldman]. He got me in this movie in Italy. I was all set to come to New York and set up shop, but I did the [Luchino Visconti] movie [Senso (1954)] out of necessity. I made an awful lot of money on that one since I had signed for just three months, and it dragged on for nine.
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