MUMBAI: Farley Granger, who played the likable tennis professional in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Strangers on a Train has expired of natural causes in New York. He was 85.

In 1948, Granger had won acclaim for another Hitchcock murder thriller, Rope, in which he played a young pianist who perpetrates a Leopold Loeb-type murder with a fellow school chum. 

Under contract to producer Samuel Goldwyn during his relatively short Hollywood career, he played a confused or neurotic young man who always faces a series of melodramatic problems. After appearing opposite Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Anderson in 1952, he bought out his Goldwyn contract and traveled to Europe in 1954 where he starred in Luchino Visconti‘s Senso.

In 2007, Granger published a memoir, Include Me Out, in which he confessed of being a bisexual. The book documented his affairs with Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner and Patricia Neal as well as playwright Arthur Laurents and a two-night fling with Leonard Bernstein.

Since ‘60s, 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 US flyer court-martialed by the Japanese before joining the Navy in 1944. His last film appearance was in the art world satire The Next Big Thing in 2001.