The Lonely End of Stewart Granger: The Hollywood Star Who Married a Princess HT

There is a photograph of Stuart Granger taken in the late 1980s. He is sitting alone at a restaurant table in Beverly Hills. Well-dressed as always, his jaw still strong, but the table is set for one. He rode horses, wielded swords, hunted lions, and married a woman who had actually been a princess. And yet he spent his final years largely forgotten, bitter about what had slipped through his fingers and honest about his own failures in a way that most Hollywood men of his generation never quite managed. This is the story of how a man who had everything ended up utterly alone and how he felt about it. Part nine, the man before the myth. James Leblash Stewart was born on May 6th, 1913 in London in the old Brmpton Road area of Kensington to be exact. His

father was a military man. His greatgrandfather, Luigi Leblash, was one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 19th century, famous enough to have sung at the funerals of both Beethoven and Shopan. There was drama in the blood clearly, though it would take a few generations to find its outlet.

He grew up in comfortable circumstances, educated at Epsom College, and later trained at the Weber Douglas School of Dramatic Art. He was handsome in a way that made people look twice. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark eyes, and a confident stride that suggested he already knew rooms would rearrange themselves around him when he walked in.

When he began performing on the London stage in the 1930s, he quickly attracted attention. But the name James Stewart was already taken. There was already a James Stewart in Hollywood, a lanky fellow from Pennsylvania who would go on to win an Academy Award and become one of the most beloved actors in American history.

So, young James Stewart needed something else. He chose the surname Granger, and with it he stepped into a new identity entirely. Stuart Granger. The name suited him. It sounded like a man who could handle a rifle and a woman in the same afternoon without breaking a sweat. He worked steadily through the early 1940s in British cinema, building a reputation with films like The Man in Gray in 1943 and Fanny by Gaslight in 1944.

both of which were enormous hits in wartime Britain. Audiences at the time were hungry for escapism, for heroes who looked like they could sort things out, and Granger gave them exactly that. He had what only a handful of actors in any generation actually possess, a quality that cannot be taught, cannot be manufactured, and cannot be faked on screen.

The camera simply loved him. He was also in those early years developing the personality that would make him both deeply compelling and occasionally deeply difficult to be around. He had strong opinions about everything, film, politics, people, and he expressed them without much concern for how they landed.

He could be extraordinarily generous. He was reportedly the kind of man who would give a stranger his coat on a cold evening and then argue loudly with the restaurant manager over the quality of the bread. Charm and abrasion woven together in roughly equal measure. The British film industry in the 1940s was a strange and vibrant place.

Smaller than Hollywood, more class conscious, but capable in those wartime years of producing films that genuinely moved and excited audiences. Granger found a natural home in it. He was not a drawing room actor, not the kind of elegant, measured performer who suited the more restrained corners of British cinema.

He was physical, direct, present in a way that the melodramas and adventure films of the era could actually use. He married actress Elizabeth March in 1938, and they had two children together, a daughter, Lindsay, and a son, Jaime. It was a conventional beginning for a man who would go on to live anything but a conventional life.

But behind the matinea idle exterior, Granger was restless, always restless. The stage and the early films satisfied something in him, but there was always a sense, in the accounts of people who knew him in those years, that he was looking toward a larger horizon. Britain felt perhaps like a stage that was too small for the performance he intended to give.

And that restlessness, which would define so much of what came next, was already starting to pull at the edges of his carefully constructed world. And what happened when that restlessness collided with the most famous film set in 1940s? Britain is the part of this story that almost nobody remembers today. Part eight, Jean Simmons and the marriage that shocked Britain.

In 1949, Stuart Granger met Jean Simmons on the set of Adam and Evelyn. She was 20 years old. He was 36. She had already appeared in Great Expectations and Hamlet, and the British press had already decided she was going to be one of the great beauties of the century. They were right, as it turned out.

What developed between them on that set was not subtle. Granger later described the feeling in terms that left very little to the imagination. It was immediate, overwhelming, and for him at least, entirely disorienting. He was still married to Elizabeth March at the time. He had two children. He had a life, a structure, a set of obligations that most men of his era would have quietly honored, even if they were miserable.

Granger was not most men. He pursued Simmons with an intensity that he made no effort to hide. The British press followed the whole thing with gleeful disapproval. Here was one of England’s most admired leading men openly courting a woman 16 years his junior while his marriage fell apart in the background.

Elizabeth March eventually agreed to a divorce and in 1950 Stuart Granger and John Simmons were married. They made a stunning couple. By any external measure it looked like a fairy tale. Two of the most attractive people in British cinema, deeply in love, stepping into the future together.

And for a while, it genuinely was. Then Hollywood came calling. Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire who controlled RKO Pictures at the time, had become fixated on Jean Simmons. He wanted to sign her. He had seen her in Hamlet and decided with the particular certainty of a man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted that she belonged in his studio.

He pursued the contract with a persistence that went well beyond professional interest. He delayed other projects she had committed to. He interfered with scheduling in ways that were difficult to prove but impossible to ignore. He behaved, in short, like a man who believed that enough money and enough power made the word no optional.

What followed was one of the uglier chapters in a Hollywood era that had plenty of ugly chapters. Granger, fiercely protective of his wife, was furious. He was not the kind of man who absorbed insults quietly, and the situation with Hughes was not quiet. It played out across months of legal maneuvering, contract disputes, and increasingly tense communications between parties whose interests were fundamentally incompatible.

Granger later spoke about Hughes in terms so heated that his publishers reportedly asked him to moderate certain passages in his memoir. The passages that remained were still considerable. Hughes eventually relented, but not before making clear that he could make life difficult for anyone who defied him in his own industry.

Jean Simmons was eventually able to work for other studios, including MGM, where she would go on to considerable success. But the experience had left a mark on her relationship with the business, on Grers’s blood pressure, and on the couple’s sense that Hollywood was a place where you had to fight for everything, including things that should have been straightforward.

MGM had signed Granger to a contract, and the roles that followed would make him internationally famous. The studio understood exactly what they had. They pointed him toward the kinds of material that would use everything he offered, the physicality, the authority, the easy command of dangerous situations.

And for several extraordinary years, it worked better than anyone had a right to expect. But the private cost of those years was already accumulating in ways that would take decades to fully surface. And what happened next when MGM pointed him toward the role that would define his entire career is the part where the story of Stuart Granger becomes genuinely extraordinary.

Part seven, King Solomon’s minds and the birth of an icon. In 1950, MGM cast Stuart Granger as Alan Quartermain in King Solomon’s Minds. The film was shot almost entirely on location in Africa, in Kenya, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo under conditions that were by any reasonable standard genuinely punishing.

The cast and crew spent months in the field. There were extreme temperatures, difficult terrain, encounters with wildlife that were not staged for the camera. and a production schedule that left almost no room for comfort. The shoot became, in its own way, a kind of test of physical endurance, of professional commitment, and of the question of whether a British actor who had made his name in studiobound melodramas could command a genuinely wild environment.

The answer, emphatically, was yes. Granger did not simply survive the conditions. He seemed to find them invigorating. Accounts from the production describe him as energized, engaged, completely in his element, more relaxed in certain ways than he was on conventional sets where the only drama was between people rather than between people and their surroundings.

Deborah Kerr, who played opposite him as the female lead, later said that Granger had an unusual quality on that set, a genuine ease with physical reality that was not common among actors of his generation, many of whom preferred the controlled environment of a studio where everything could be adjusted. Granger, by contrast, seemed to get better when things got harder.

The film was a massive commercial success, earning two Academy Awards for best cinematography and best film editing and cementing Grers’s status as one of MGM’s most valuable leading men. It was the kind of film that created a particular image of its star in the public mind, an image so vivid and so complete that it became difficult to separate the actor from the role.

Alan Quartermain, tough, competent, morally reliable, at home in landscapes that would destroy lesser men, was in the public imagination simply Steuart Granger with a different name. The following year brought Soldiers 3 and then in 1952 Scaramoosh, a swashbuckling epic featuring what film historians have since identified as one of the longest sword fights ever committed to film at that point, running nearly 7 minutes.

Granger performed the majority of it himself. He had trained seriously for the role with fencing master John Herammans, and it showed. The choreography was precise, the commitment was total, and audiences were transfixed in a way that carefully digitized action sequences rarely manage to replicate today.

There was something in watching a real man do a genuinely difficult physical thing with evident skill and without any visible net beneath him. Then came the prisoner of Zender in 1952, young Bess in 1953, where he played Thomas Seymour opposite John Simmons’s Elizabeth I, which gave their real life chemistry an outlet on screen, and Bo Brl in 1954.

Film after film, year after year, each one confirming what the audience already sensed. This was a man who could carry a movie on his shoulders without appearing to strain. He was for a brief but brilliant window one of the biggest stars in the world. The fan mail arrived in staggering quantities.

Women wrote to him from every country where his films played. He was recognized everywhere he went. He earned significant money. He lived in a manner appropriate to his status. Well, perhaps slightly more than appropriate given his fondness for a certain level of comfort that didn’t always align with his actual financial situation.

There were houses, cars, the general apparatus of a life lived at a scale that assumed the income would continue indefinitely. And all the while, beneath the surface of the public career, the private life with Jean Simmons was changing in ways that neither of them fully acknowledged at the time.

The years that followed those glorious early 1950s would not be kind. But before all of that, there is the matter of the princess, and that is a story so strange and so specific that it deserves its own chapter entirely. Part six, the princess. In 1964, Stuart Granger married Carolyn Constance Martini.

This requires a moment of explanation. Carolyn Martini was not a princess in the way that a fairy tale uses the word. She was not of royal blood in the conventional hereditary sense, but she held the title of princess derived through her first marriage to Prince Zurab Chkura, a member of the Georgian royal family.

a lineage with deep historical roots, even if the political circumstances of the 20th century had scattered that family, like so many European noble houses, far from their origins. When Granger married her, she brought that title with her. And so, in the particular way that these things work in aristocratic circles, the newspapers could truthfully write that Stuart Granger had married a princess.

Some of them did with considerable enthusiasm. But let’s back up because before 1964, there was the collapse of the marriage to John Simmons. And that is a story that tells us a great deal about who Stuart Granger actually was when the cameras stopped rolling. By the late 1950s, the marriage had developed serious fractures.

Granger was difficult. He said so himself later without much reluctance. He had a temper that flared quickly and a stubbornness that made reconciliation when arguments arose, a slow and often incomplete process. He was demanding in ways that wore people down. He could be jealous, controlling, and occasionally impossible to reason with.

Jean Simmons was talented, ambitious, and possessed of a quiet strength that did not respond well to being managed. The combination was volatile. There were periods of separation. There were attempts to salvage what they had. But by 1960, the marriage was effectively over, and the divorce was finalized that year.

They had one daughter together, Tracy Granger, born in 1956. Granger later wrote about the end of that marriage with an honesty that is genuinely rare for men of his background and generation. He did not cast himself as the victim. He acknowledged that he had been the source of many of the marriage’s difficulties.

“He missed her,” he said, and the way he wrote about it suggested that he never entirely stopped. After a brief marriage to Belgian actress and model Caroline Lassurf in 1964, which lasted only a matter of months, Granger married Carolyn Martini later that same year. That marriage lasted until 1969. Between 1960 and 1969, Granger lived through a version of his life that would have been disorienting for anyone.

multiple marriages, a career that was cooling after its extraordinary peak, and a restlessness that seemed to intensify rather than diminish as he got older. He moved between Europe and America. He worked steadily, but less prominently than before. He searched in the way that people search when they are not entirely certain what they are looking for.

And then there was the career itself, which by the mid 1960s had entered a new and considerably less glamorous phase. Part five, the long decline. The transition from major Hollywood star to working actor is one that very few people in the film industry navigate with any grace. The roles slow down.

The caliber of the productions shifts. The phone still rings, but the calls are different now. Lesser budgets, smaller directors, films that will not make anyone’s list of favorites. For Stuart Granger, this transition began in earnest in the early 1960s. MGM had not renewed his contract after the 1950s.

And without the studio system to manufacture and maintain a stars profile, Granger found himself navigating a changed landscape. Hollywood itself was changing. The old studio model was fracturing. Television was pulling audiences away from cinemas, and the tastes of moviegoing audiences were shifting towards something raw, more psychologically complex, less interested in the kind of heroic adventure that Granger had perfected.

The world he had been built for was being dismantled around him, piece by piece. He made a series of European co-productions, westerns, and adventure films shot in Germany, Italy, and Spain that were commercially minded but artistically modest. The spaghetti western boom of the 1960s and early 1970s offered employment to a number of American and British stars whose Hollywood prominence had faded, and Granger appeared in several of these productions.

He was professional in all of them. He showed up. He performed. He was reliable. But these were not the kinds of films that reminded audiences of Scaramoosh. He appeared in a number of television productions through the 1960s and 1970s, including a stint as the lead in The Men from Shiloh, a television western that ran for a single season in 1970 and 1971.

He was in his late 50s by then, still physically imposing, still watchable, but operating in a context that bore no resemblance to the world he had inhabited at the top of the MGM roster. Television in that era paid modestly. More importantly, it was understood by people of Grers’s generation to be a step down, a perception that, whatever its fairness, colored the experience of working in it.

He took this better than some of his contemporaries and worse than others. He was not given to pretending that things were other than they were. If the work was not what it had been, he said so, usually in colorful terms that made publicists nervous, but that had the virtue of being accurate.

The financial situation, which had never been as robust as the lifestyle suggested, became increasingly precarious. Granger had earned substantial money during his peak years, but he had also spent substantial money on properties, on the costs of multiple marriages and their endings, on the particular kind of lifestyle that major Hollywood stars of the 1950s considered baseline rather than extravagant.

He owned a cattle ranch in Arizona for a period. He had properties in Spain. He moved between countries with the ease of someone who had never had to worry about what it cost, which is precisely the habit of mind that becomes dangerous when the income no longer justifies it. He invested in various ventures over the years, some of which worked out, more of which did not.

He was not a cautious man by nature, and caution is what financial preservation generally requires. He was never destitute, but by the 1970s he was living in considerably reduced circumstances compared to the peak of his earning years. And the gap between the image of Stuart Granger, the MGM star, the adventure hero, the man who married a princess, and the reality of his day-to-day life had grown wide enough to be uncomfortable.

What makes this period genuinely interesting is not the decline itself. Many actors experience that, but the way Granger processed it. He was not a man who suffered in silence. He talked, he complained eloquently. He gave interviews in which he expressed opinions about the film industry, about producers, about directors, about the general state of the world, with a directness that many of his former colleagues found alarming and that his fans found either refreshing or exhausting depending on their tolerance for cander. He was particularly harsh about the way Hollywood treated its actors once the peak years passed. He felt with some justification that the industry discarded people without ceremony and without guilt. He watched contemporaries who had been lionized in the 1950s

struggle for work in the 1970s, and he did not pretend that this was anything other than what it was, a brutal and unscentimental business that dressed itself up in glamour to conceal the cold arithmetic underneath. But even in the bitterness, there were moments of something else. And those moments take us to the part of the story that is in many ways the most revealing.

Part four, the memoir and the man behind it. In 1981, Stuart Granger published his autobiography. He called it Sparks Fly Upward, a title taken from the book of Job, which tells you something about his frame of mind. It is one of the most candid and in places astonishing memoirs ever produced by a major Hollywood figure.

He wrote about his marriages with a directness that left very little softened. He wrote about his temper. He wrote about his jealousy. He wrote about the ways he had failed the people he loved. He wrote about Howard Hughes in terms that were legally problematic enough that certain passages were modified before publication. He wrote about producers and studio executives with the kind of clarity that people usually reserve for private conversations.

He was funny often. He was bitter sometimes. He was honest in a way that was unusual for the era and the genre. Hollywood memoirs of that period tended toward the carefully curated, the strategically selective. Granger’s book felt like something closer to an actual reckoning. What comes through most clearly in passage after passage is a man who genuinely loved the life he had lived, the adventure of it, the physicality of it, the extraordinary access to experience that his career had granted him, but who had not quite figured out how to maintain the things that should have lasted, the marriages, the close friendships, the domestic steadiness that might have given him somewhere solid to And when the career quieted down, he had a talent for intensity. He could be, by all accounts, an absolutely

magnetic presence, generous, funny, genuinely warm in ways that photographs do not capture. But intensity, sustained over decades, is exhausting for the people living alongside it. and he seemed to understand by the time he was writing the book that this had cost him more than he had reckoned at the time.

The book sold reasonably well. It reminded audiences who remembered his films of who he had been. It introduced him to a younger generation who had never seen King Solomon’s minds or Scaramoosh. For a brief period he was back in conversation on chat programs, in newspaper profiles, in retrospective pieces about golden age Hollywood, and then gradually the attention receded again.

Part three, the years no one talks about. The 1980s were quiet in a way that Granger had probably not anticipated. He was in his 70s. The film roles were occasional and minor. The television work had slowed. He lived for periods in Spain and for periods in Los Angeles, and neither place seems to have provided the sense of belonging he was looking for.

Spain had been a sanctuary of sorts in the 1960s and 1970s, a place where the cost of living was manageable, where the pace was different from Hollywood’s relentless self-promotion, where he could hunt, ride, and exist without constantly being measured against his own former glory. He had spent enough time there that he spoke Spanish with some fluency, and had developed genuine affection for the country.

But as his health became a consideration, Los Angeles, with its medical facilities, its film industry connections, its familiar streets drew him back. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a city he recognized and didn’t quite recognize at the same time. The studios that had shaped his career were still there.

But the people who had populated them, the producers, the directors, the fellow actors who had been his colleagues and contemporaries were gone in one way or another, dead or retired or simply no longer part of the daily conversation of the industry. Hollywood has a short memory by professional necessity.

The machine must keep moving and it moves toward whoever is useful to it now, not whoever was useful to it 30 years ago. He had a son, James, from his relationship with a woman he had been involved with after his marriages ended, a detail that is often omitted from accounts of his life, perhaps because it doesn’t fit neatly into the more dramatic narrative of his three marriages.

He cared about his children by his own account, but the parapotetic nature of his adult life had not made him a consistently present father, and he knew it. Being the kind of father he had wanted to be required a kind of rootedness that his temperament and his career had conspired against for most of his adult life.

He was in contact with Tracy, his daughter, with Jean Simmons. And the relationship was complicated in the way that relationships between absent fathers and their adult children often are. Loving on both sides, probably, but carrying the weight of years of distance that cannot simply be explained away by pointing to the extraordinary circumstances of the life that created that distance.

Jean Simmons, meanwhile, had rebuilt her life. She had married director Richard Brooks in 1960, and though that marriage eventually ended in 1977, she had continued working with Intelligence and Grace, winning a Golden Globe for her performance in the 1983 television minisseries The Thorn Birds, earning attention for her stage work, remaining active in the industry in ways that Granger had not managed.

She was busy. She was engaged with the world. She had constructed from the materials of a complicated life something that looked and felt like a genuine future. He spoke about her in interviews during this period with a warmth that was unmistakable and by any reading genuine. He was careful not to be mlin about it.

He was too proud for that and too aware of his own role in how things had ended. But when her name came up, something in his manner shifted. There was a softness there that didn’t appear when he talked about much else. He also spoke in various interviews from this period about his loneliness. Not in those exact words.

He was too proud for that kind of directness, but it was there between the lines. He talked about friends who had died, about the strangeness of a world that had changed so completely from the one he had known, about the way Los Angeles felt different now from how it had felt in 1950 when he arrived there, full of momentum and absolutely certain of his own future.

The city was the same city in its outlines, but the city he had lived in was gone, along with most of the people who had made it what it was. He had a few close friendships that sustained him through these years. He was sharp mentally right through his final years. His memory for detail remained impressive.

His opinions remained emphatic. His ability to tell a story remained intact. He was not a diminished version of himself in that sense. He was very much himself. But the context had changed so fundamentally around him that it sometimes seemed like he was living in a country whose language he had once spoken fluently.

But that had over the years shifted into a dialect he could only partially follow. There was one more thing, and it is the kind of detail that tends to stay with you. Part two, the final years. By the early 1990s, Stuart Grers’s health had begun to decline. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

He was in his late 70s, living mostly in Los Angeles, and facing the kind of illness that requires the presence of people who care about you in immediate, practical ways. He was not entirely without support. There were people who checked in on him, old colleagues, a small circle of friends who had survived the decades. But the structure of daily care that surrounds a person at the end of life, the steady, unglamorous, enormously important work of simply being there requires relationships that have been built over decades and maintained through all the friction and difficulty that relationships inevitably involve. Granger had, by his own admission, not always done that maintenance work. He had prioritized movement over stillness, intensity over patience, the next thing over the careful tending of what was

already there. The cost of that became apparent now in a way that no amount of charm or talent or past glory could offset. He gave a small number of interviews in his final years. In them he was reflective in ways that his earlier public persona had not often permitted. He talked about the things he wished he had done differently.

He talked about the women he had loved. He talked about his children in terms that suggested he was aware of the gaps that his lifestyle had created even if he could not entirely account for them. He was not Mlin. That was not his style. But there was a kind of cleareyed sadness in some of those final conversations.

The sadness of someone who has had the enormous good fortune to live a remarkable life and who also understands at the end of it that remarkable lives are not always the same thing as fully lived ones. Stuart Granger died on August 16th, 1993 at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 80 years old.

The cause of death was complications from prostate cancer. The obituaries were respectful and thorough. They named the films. They recalled the peak years. They mentioned John Simmons and the marriages and the memoir. Some of them quoted lines from Sparks Fly Upward that captured his particular voice.

Sardonic, confident, unexpectedly vulnerable when he allowed it to be. He was cremated. His ashes were scattered at sea off the California coast. No monument, no official archive, no estate that became a museum or a foundation. Just the films which are still there for anyone who goes looking. Part one. What remains? There is a way of measuring a career like Stuart Grers that focuses entirely on the work.

the box office numbers, the critical reception, the place in film history. By those measures, he was significant. King Solomon’s Minds and Scaramoosh are genuinely remarkable films, products of a kind of Hollywood craftsmanship that no longer exists in quite the same form. His performance in Scaramoosh in particular has a quality that contemporary action films rarely achieve.

A physical unironic commitment to the material that makes you believe completely in the world the film is creating. But there is another way of measuring a life and it has nothing to do with films. Granger was a man of extraordinary gifts who found those gifts both sustaining and limiting. His confidence gave him the courage to pursue everything he wanted.

His impatience made it difficult to preserve what he caught. His honesty, which was one of his most appealing qualities, was also the quality that caused the most damage to his relationships, to his professional standing, to his reputation in an industry that rewards discretion more than truth. He loved John Simmons by most evidence, as genuinely as he had ever loved anyone.

He was not able to be the husband she needed. He knew that, and he said so, which in its way is a form of integrity, even if it came too late to change anything. He loved his children imperfectly and at too great a distance. He knew that, too. He lived an adventure that most people, sitting in darkened cinemas, watching him on screen, their hearts lifting at the sight of him riding across some African horizon, could only dream about.

And at the end of that adventure, he sat alone at a restaurant table in Beverly Hills, well-dressed, jaw still strong, looking at a world that had mostly moved on. There is something in that image that stays with you. Not because it is tragic in some oporatic way. Granger would have been the first to reject that framing loudly, but because it is recognizably human.

The gap between the life you appear to have and the life you are actually living is a gap that most of us know in some version from the inside. Grers’s version of it was simply lived at a scale that makes it easier to see. He was magnificent. He was difficult. He was honest. He was lonely. He was 80 years old.

And he had lived one of the most improbable lives of the 20th century. And he faced the end of it with the same combination of pride and cleareyed regret that had characterized most of what came before. That is not a failure. It is something more complicated and more interesting than failure. It is a life. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.