His real name is James Lablanche Stewart. He was born on May 6, 1913 in London. He studied at Epsom College in Saray, later on the advice of his friend Michael Wilding (in the future - a famous film actor who starred in both the UK and the USA) entered the London School of Dramatic Art Webber-Douglas. He began in repertory theatres in Hull and Birmingham. He came to the cinema in the first half of the thirties, fighting at first as an extra and performer of episodic roles. His first notable role was in So, This Is London (1939, Thornton Freeland). At the same time, not to be confused with the famous Hollywood actor James Stewart, he took the artistic pseudonym Stuart Granger. With the beginning of the Second World War, he was drafted into the army, but already in 1942 he was demobilized for health reasons.
In the forties, Granger became one of the leading actors of British cinema, starring in the films "The Man in Grey" (1943, dir. Leslie Arllis), "Fanny in the Gaslight" (1944, dir. Anthony Esquit), "Love Story" (1944, dir. Lesley Arliss), "Madonna of the Seven Moons" (Dir. Arthur Crabtree). Granger’s tall, athletic build, with his courageous, strong-willed face, was, along with James Mason, the personification of the romantic hero of British cinema of the time. He also appeared in a large-scale, expensive adaptation of Bernard Shaw's play Caesar and Cleopatra (1946, dir. Gabriel Pascal) starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Raines, playing the Greek Apollodore. In 1950, Granger, who by that time had already been divorced from his first wife actress Elspeth March, married a rising star of the screen, actress Jean Simmons.
After signing a contract with the film studio "Metro Goldwyn Meyer", in the early fifties Granger moved to work in Hollywood. His first American film was the adventure film King Solomon's Mines (1950, Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton), in which he played hunter Allan Quartermain. In Hollywood, Granger was in demand as a performer of the roles of “real” men, harsh and decisive. Among his Hollywood roles are the avenging French aristocrat Andre Moreau in Scaramush (1952, George Sidney), the Englishman Rudolf Resendy, who unwittingly became king of the fictional country of Ruritania in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952, Richard Thorpe), Admiral Thomas Seymour in Young Bess (1953, dir. George Sidney), the Roman warlord Claudius in Salome (1953, directed by William Dieterle) and the bison hunter Sandy McKhosay in 1956. The following year, his contract with Metro Goldwyn Meyer expired and he began filming not only in the United States, but also in Europe, including in his homeland. One of Granger’s most famous films of this time was the American adventure comedy North of Alaska (1960, Henry Hathaway), in which he played alongside John Wayne. His marriage to Jean Simmons broke up in 1960, and four years later Granger married twenty-two-year-old Belgian beauty queen Caroline Le Cerf. While working in Europe, the actor starred in such films as “Sodom and Gomorrah” (1962, dir. Robert Aldrich) and “The Fencer from Siena” (1962, dir. Bacio Bandini), played an Indian nicknamed “The Faithful Hand” in German-Yugoslav westerns based on the novels of Karl May “Among the Kites” (1964, dir. Alfred Forer), “The Oil Prince” (1965, dir. Harald Philippe), “The Faithful Hand is a friend of the Indians” (1965, Alfred Hayer in the United States). In 1972, he played Sherlock Holmes in the television film The Baskerville Dog (Directed by Barry Crane), however, his career was already sliding towards the end and in the future he was filmed quite irregularly, mainly on American television. Among Granger’s later acting work, one can mention the small role of the corrupt industrialist Materson in the film Wild Geese (1978, Richard McLaglen) with Richard Harris, Roger Moore and Richard Burton. In his later autobiography, Sparks Fly Up, the actor wrote that he was not proud of any of his films. At the end of 1989, a few years before his death, Granger appeared on the stage for the first time in many years in Somerset Maugham’s play The Circle alongside the famous actor Rex Harrison. Stuart Granger died on August 16, 1993 in Santa Monica, California.
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