Farley Granger Dies at 85

Read The Advocate's 1996 interview with Farley Granger.

Farley Granger, a bisexual actor perhaps best known for his performances in two homoerotic Alfred Hitchcock suspense dramas, Rope and Strangers on a Train, has died at 85 of natural causes.

Granger's matinee-idol good looks helped him rise to prominence as a versatile Hollywood leading man in the late 1940s. Two of his best-regarded performances were for director Hitchcock. In 1948, Granger starred as a thrill killer in Rope, a fictionalized account of the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder. Three years later he starred for the director again as a tennis player wrongly suspected of murder in Strangers on a Train. Both films feature a heavy gay subtext in the interactions between the lead male characters. Granger eventually became a respected theater performer, appearing in a revival of The King and I, and playing a bisexual writer in the drama Deathtrap. In 1995, Granger was interviewed for The Celluloid Closet, a documentary about homosexuality in cinema.

Granger described himself as bisexual and had relationships with several famous women, including Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. He was also romantically involved with several notable men, including writer Arthur Laurents and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. His longtime partner Robert Calhoun, with whom he wrote the memoir Include Me Out, died in 2008. In the memoir, with a title taken from a famous malapropism by movie mogul Sam Goldwyn, Granger candidly discussed his personal life.

Granger leaves no immediate survivors.