Farley Granger Death: Natural Causes

Hollywood’s Golden Age actor, Farley Granger, passed away in New York City on March 27, 2011 from natural causes. The 85-year-old actor was well-known for his role in the 1951 Hitchcock thriller, “Strangers on a Train.” He co-starred with Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony, the “criss-cross” sociopath who wants to trade murders with Farley’s character, Guy Haines.

The movie, in which Alfred Hitchcock appeared in a customary cameo, was also the basis for the Billy Crystal/Danny DeVito comedic takeoff, “Throw Momma From the Train (1987).”

Granger’s co-star, Robert Walker tragically died a couple of months before the film’s 1951 release of “Strangers on a Train,” believing that David O. Selznick ruined his life by stealing his wife, Jennifer Jones, away.

Farley Granger bought his contract out from Samuel Goldwyn, left Hollywood and chose to become a Broadway actor in New York City.

“I played the same part over and over again,” Granger once told an audience, and in 1950, when his character killed a priest in “Edge of Doom, he said: “I should have killed Sam Goldwyn.”

Mr. Granger published his autobiography, Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway, in 2008, with the help of his life partner, Robert Calhoun. Farley included many details of his lengthy career as well as the impact of Hollywood machinations upon many actors and actresses he personally knew.

He also devoted a page to some of his favorite leading ladies, such as Cathy O’Donnell, Dorothy McGuire and Joan Collins.

And of course, a whole page to the “love of his life,” Shelley Winters, whom he also called “the bane of my existence.”