Stewart Granger [James Lablanche Stewart] (1913-1993) b. London, England.

British actor who was one of the top British box-office attractions as a romantic lead in the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s. Less dangerous than Mason, in The Man in Grey (1943) and Fanny by Gaslight (1944) he played the chivalrous champion of damsels placed in distress by Mason’s aristocratic villainy. In Love Story (1944), a contemporary melodrama, he played a gallant RAF pilot threatened by blindness, while in the exotic Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) he was a gypsy brigand offering Phyllis Calvert a romantic alternative to respectability with a rich Italian banker.

Outside the Gainsborough series, but still a romantic genre actor, he starred in Frank Launder’s Captain Boycott (1947) and Basil Dearden‘s Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), before moving to Hollywood in the 1950s for a series of swashbuckling adventurer roles under contract to MGM: King Solomon’s Mines (1950), Scaramouche (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Beau Brummell (1954), Moonfleet (1955) and Bhowani Junction (1956). In realistic vein, Sidney Gilliat cast him as a predatory spiv in Waterloo Road (1945) and Dearden exploited his moral ambiguity in The Secret Partner (1961). His film career declined in the 1970s, and he later worked mainly for American television.