Stewart Granger: The forgotten action hero of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’
The star of a string of quaint British melodramas becoming a bankable action hero at the height of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ is unexpected, to say the least, but Stewart Granger became an international drawing card when he swapped costume dramas for feats of derring-do.
Beginning his career in the early 1930s, the onset of World War II pumped the brakes on his initial ascent, with Granger being discharged from the military in 1942 after suffering from stomach ulcers. However, the very next year, he landed his breakthrough after securing his first starring role in The Man in Grey.
For several years, Gainsborough Pictures became synonymous with a string of literary adaptations, light-hearted romances, and flights of fancy that were churned out in quick succession thanks to a number of recurring actors and crew members taking regular roles in many of them.
Granger would work on Gainsborough’s Fanny by Gaslight (no laughing at the back), Love Story, Madonna of the Seven Moons, and Caravan. Not that he was required to stretch himself as a performer, though, with the star knowing that it was a means to an end that helped raise his profile after describing Love Story as “a load of crap and a smash hit.”
By the end of the decade, Granger was established enough that he fancied trying his luck in Hollywood, which proved to be the right decision at the perfect time. After Errol Flynn had turned down the part of Allan Quartermain in a 1950 adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines, his American debut came playing the leading role in a rollicking adventure that recouped its budget more than seven times over at the box office.
Studio MGM was so impressed it tied him down to a seven-year contract, and he was soon rubbing shoulders with the A-list. He took top billing in action comedy Soldiers Three, led the line in hard-boiled crime thriller The Light Touch in a part initially earmarked for Cary Grant, and was given centre stage in gun-toting western The Wild North.
He’d buckle swashes in 1952’s Scaramouche, smoulder with Deborah Kerr in The Prisoner of Zenda, sizzle opposite Rita Hayworth in Salome, sail the seas in All the Brothers Were Valiant, and take second spot on the ensemble of Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska behind John Wayne. For a man born in Kensington, Granger was making this Hollywood action star thing look incredibly easy.
Even when he left America behind, he refused to give up his ass-kicking ways. Detouring to Europe, he worked with The Dirty Dozen director Robert Aldrich on Sodom and Gomorrah, pitched up in then-Yugoslavia for Roger Corman’s war flick The Secret Invasion, diverted his attention to Italy to lead the line in actioner Commando, and dusted off his swashbuckling skills in Swordsman of Siena.
Granger would enter semi-retirement in the 1970s and only make sporadic returns to film and television before his death at the age of 80 in August 1993, but for a while, he was among action cinema’s hottest commodities, a far cry from his humble melodramatic origins.
