Farley Granger: unique name, good looks, average talent

So, word came this morning that Farley Granger had died.

Unlike Elizabeth Taylor, that name doesn’t mean a whole lot to members of my generation. Granger, who was 85 when he died Sunday in Manhattan, was a contemporary of my father. But even my father would probably just have shrugged when told of Granger’s passing.

Digression: My father’s opinions were fierce and uncompromising. He didn’t think, for example, that either Dean Martin or Perry Como could sing. But in his later years, he listened to a lot of Ray Stevens’ novelty songs. Go figure.

Anyway, Granger was lucky, the way that Tippi Hedren and Kim Novack were lucky: He was just the kind of guileless actor that Alfred Hitchcock wanted for roles in his films “Rope” and “Strangers on a Train.”

Granger’s performances in those two films were competent, if not perticularly memorable. Certainly not as memorable as his name. More impressive was Granager’s decision in the mid-‘50s to abandon Hollywood for the New York stage (where, at least at first, he was fairly unsuccessful). He made ends meet mostly by doing television.

He returned to movies in the 1970s, but his star had long dimmed. He never achieved the fame that he’d enjoyed early on, which likely had been a blend of his good looks, his relationship with the great Hitchcock and his unique name (which was real and no Hollywood invention).

Below : Farley Granger with Robert Walker in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”