Monday, March 28, 2011

Farley Granger Has Died At Age 85

Farley Granger, who played one of Lisa's many husband's on AS THE WORLD TURNS, died Sunday of natural causes in New York. He was 85.

Non-soap fans know him best as the likable tennis pro who was thrust into a murder exchange in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train in 1951. Soap fans loved him as Earl Mitchell, Lisa's husband on AS THE WORLD TURNS during the early Douglas Marland years. His other soap roles included Trent Archer on THE EDGE OF NIGHT and Will Vernon on ONE LIFE TO LIVE.

In 2007, Granger published a memoir, "Include Me Out," in which he told of being bisexual, documenting affairs with Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner and Patricia Neal as well as playwright Arthur Laurents and a two-night fling with Leonard Bernstein. Since the 1960s, he lived with his longtime partner Robert Calhoun, a soap opera producer, who died three years ago.

Granger made his movie debut playing a Russian in Lewis Milestone's The North Star, a war propaganda moved about the Soviet Union's resistance to Nazi Occupation, written by Lillian Hellman. He next appeared in another World War II film, The Purple Heart, as a U.S. flyer court-martialed by the Japanese before joining the Navy in 1944. While stationed in Honolulu, he had his first sexual experiences -- with both a man and a woman on the same night.

"I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt," he later wrote. "I have loved men. I have loved women."

His last film appearance was in the art world satire The Next Big Thing in 2001.

2 comments:

  1. RIP, Farley Granger!

    We loved watching you play Earl on ATWT! You'll be in heaven now with Robert!

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  2. I like Farley Granger movies... ROPE, OUR VERY OWN, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, and then the transition into soaps. He had a nice face to look at. I did not no he was Gay and he was so open about his personal life and his relationship with Shelly Interesting stuff RIP.

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