Stewart Granger (born James Lablache Stewart) was a British film actor, mainly associated with heroic and romantic leading roles. He was a popular leading man from the 1940s to the early 1960s, rising to fame through his appearances in the Gainsborough melodramas.
When he became an actor, he was advised to change his name in order to avoid being confused with the American actor James Stewart. Granger was his Scottish grandmother's maiden name. Offscreen friends and colleagues continued to call him Jimmy for the rest of his life, but to the general public he became Stewart Granger.
Granger's first starring film role was as the acid-tongued Rokeby in the Gainsborough Pictures period melodrama The Man in Grey (1943), a movie that helped to make him and his three co-stars – James Mason, Phyllis Calvert and Margaret Lockwood – box-office names in Britain.
More popular was Fanny by Gaslight (1944), another for Gainsborough Pictures, which reunited him with Calvert and Mason, and added Jean Kent. The New York Times reported that Granger "is a young man worth watching. The customers... like his dark looks and his dash; he puts them in mind, they say of Cary Grant." It was the second most popular movie at the British box office in 1944.
Another hit was Love Story (1944), where he plays a blind pilot who falls in love with terminally ill Margaret Lockwood, with Patricia Roc co-starring. Granger filmed this at the same time as Waterloo Road (1945), playing his first villain, a "spiv" who has run off with the wife of John Mills. This movie was popular too, and it was one of Granger's favorites.
