Stuart Granger stood at the pinnacle of Hollywood in 1950, commanding $250,000 a picture at MGM, romancing Grace Kelly on screen, and married to Jean Simmons, the most luminous actress of her generation. They lived in a Beverly Hills estate with eight bedrooms, employed a full household staff, and were photographed at every premiere. By 1993, he was living alone in a rented apartment, surviving on residuals and a small pension. The houses were gone, the marriage destroyed decades earlier, and most of Hollywood had forgotten his name.

The man the world knew as Stuart Granger wasn’t born with that name or that life. He was born James Lablash Stewart in 1913 in a modest Kensington flat his father could barely afford on an army major’s salary. When he decided to pursue acting in the 1930s, he discovered another James Stewart had already registered with British Equity, so he borrowed his grandmother’s maiden name, Granger, and became someone new overnight. It was a practical fix, a bureaucratic workaround, but it was also the first time he had chosen reinvention over reality.

His first marriage in 1938 was to Elizabeth March, an established, pragmatic woman of 31 while he was 25, restless, and already ambitious in ways that made her uneasy. The war came, he served, she waited. When he returned in 1945, British studios finally wanted him, and he wanted everything they could offer: leading roles, magazine covers, adoration. She wanted a quieter life, maybe children, a home that felt permanent.

He wanted California contracts and his name above the title. They stayed married on paper, but the gulf widened every month. The real problem wasn’t what she wanted. It was what he was hiding.

In 1950, the Hays Code wasn’t just a list of rules, it was a cage. For a leading man like Granger, the cage was lined with velvet and locked from the outside. MGM knew. The studio heads had known for years.

They had seen the men who came and went from his dressing room, the late nights at private clubs in West Hollywood where the lights stayed low and the guest lists stayed buried. They didn’t care what he did as long as no one else ever found out. So they built the machinery around him. Press agents planted items about his conquests.

Gossip columnists wrote breathless pieces about his romances with leading ladies. Every public appearance was choreographed, every photograph approved. The cost was silence. He couldn’t speak about the men he’d loved, couldn’t acknowledge the relationships that mattered.

He lived split in two. Then he met Jean Simmons. She was 21 when she married Stuart Granger in December 1950. She had already been nominated for an Oscar, and her face had that rare quality the camera loved, something luminous and untouchable.

He was 37, still legally married to Elizabeth March, and drowning. The divorce had dragged on for months. He needed an exit, a way to rewrite the script the studio had written for him. Jean was the answer.

The wedding was small, rushed, almost furtive. They married in Tucson, far from the flashbulbs. Photographs from that day show her smiling, radiant in a pale suit. He stands beside her, handsome and composed, with something held back in his eyes.

By 1951, they were everywhere. Photoplay ran a spread, Life photographed them at home, the captions called them the perfect match. His films cast him as pirates and cavaliers; hers were quieter, more refined. Scaramoosh pulled in $45 million, and Young Bess made her a household name.

Hedda Hopper declared them the couple of the decade. But offscreen, the cracks were already forming. Jean learned quickly that his moods shifted without warning, that he drank more than the columnists ever mentioned, that entire nights passed when he wouldn’t speak to her at all. MGM owned them both, not just their time but their faces, their voices, the way they smiled for the cameras.

Every script, every public appearance passed through the studio first. When Jean was offered roles that conflicted with Stuart’s shooting schedule, the studio simply said no. MGM had invested $4 million in their combined star power, and the marriage itself had become product. In 1953, Jean was offered the lead in Oklahoma on Broadway.

Rodgers and Hammerstein had written the part with her in mind. It would have taken her to New York for eight months opposite a different leading man. He told her to turn it down, not asked, told. His reasoning was transparent: his next picture, Beau Brummell, shot in London the same season.

If she went to New York, the press would notice, people would ask why Mrs. Granger chose a stage over her husband. Jean said yes to him and no to Broadway. She turned down three more major roles over the next eighteen months.

Critics had called her the most luminous actress of her generation. By 1955, they had stopped calling. His drinking changed in Hollywood. It wasn’t social anymore.

It was something he did alone in the library, door closed. Jean learned the pattern: silence through dinner, a second bottle opened after she’d gone upstairs, then near midnight his voice in the hallway, too loud, looking for an argument she hadn’t started. He’d accuse her of flirting with co-stars, of conspiring with the studio. The next morning he’d apologize, flowers arrived, he’d be gentle for three days, then the silence would return.

Their daughter Tracy was born in October 1956. For a few weeks Stuart played the doting father for photographers, but fatherhood didn’t steady him. It magnified every crack already showing. Jean hired a night nurse, then a day nurse, quietly building a buffer between Tracy and the chaos.

Stuart resented it. He had wanted the appearance of family, not the relentless, sober work of raising a child. Grace Kelly arrived in Colombia in early 1954 to film Green Fire, and the chemistry between her and Stuart was undeniable. Whether anything actually happened, no one could prove, but Louella Parsons mentioned it in her column, Hedda Hopper hinted at it in hers, and Jean read both over breakfast while her husband was shooting love scenes with the most beautiful woman in Hollywood.

There were other women too: the makeup artist on Moonfleet, the Hungarian actress during The Last Hunt, the wife of a studio executive. What humiliated her most wasn’t the frequency, it was the carelessness. In January 1960, Jean Simmons filed for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court. No public statement, just a single-page petition citing mental cruelty and a request for custody of their daughter.

Stuart was in Spain shooting a costume picture when the papers were served. She never picked up his calls. Within six months she had signed a three-picture deal with Universal, moved to a house in Benedict Canyon, and enrolled Tracy in a private school under her maiden name. Jean was cast in Elmer Gantry, then The Grass Is Greener opposite Cary Grant.

Stuart got sword-and-sandal pictures shot in Yugoslavia with directors he’d never heard of. By Christmas, his last American studio contract had quietly expired. He was 47, still handsome, and suddenly worthless. In 1964 he remarried, to Caroline Lasserf, a genuine Belgian countess whose family owned textile mills and a chateau that had been in the family since 1702.

He told friends he’d finally escaped the vulgarity of Los Angeles. But Caroline watched the money disappear. He couldn’t stop spending like a star: first-class flights, houses he barely visited, tailored suits. The residuals from his MGM years had dried up.

He invested in a chain of steakhouses across Germany that closed within eighteen months, then a production company backed by a Swiss financier who vanished with the seed money. Caroline filed for divorce in 1969, walking away with her jewelry, her inheritance, and the last shred of his credibility in European society. In 1971 he married again. Her name was also Jean Simmons, a Belgian woman twenty years younger and Caroline’s cousin.

The family was horrified. The marriage lasted eighteen months. While Stuart circled the drain in Rome, Jean Simmons was having a renaissance. She married director Richard Brooks in 1960, and the stability showed.

She earned an Oscar nomination for The Happy Ending in 1969, playing a woman trapped in a suffocating marriage. By 1970 she was headlining on Broadway. Stuart moved back to Los Angeles in 1975, rented a small apartment in West Hollywood, and took whatever work came, guest spots, small parts in TV movies. In 1980 doctors found prostate cancer.

In 1981 he published his autobiography, Sparks Fly Upward, 400 pages of grievances. He blamed MGM, blamed Jean, blamed Hollywood. The memoir said nothing about the men, the affairs that stretched across decades, the lovers he kept in separate cities. He wrote about the affairs with women and walked away from the one truth that might have made him human.

In 1982 a television script called The Mysterious Stranger came across his desk, a quiet drama about an elderly man returning to confront a love affair he had hidden forty years earlier. The character was gay. He took it, and for ninety minutes of television that almost no one watched, Stuart Granger gave the most honest performance of his life. The film aired once, disappeared into the archives, and was never mentioned in any retrospective of his work.

In 1992, a letter arrived at his house. The handwriting was Jean’s. She had agreed to be interviewed for a Turner Classic Movies retrospective in 1987, speaking about his talent and his struggles with a measured grace. Now, thirty years after their divorce, she had written to him.

What she wrote, no one else has ever read. Tracy found him afterward in his study, the letter still in his hand, his face wet. He folded it carefully, put it in his desk drawer, and never mentioned it again. His health was failing by 1993, the prostate cancer had spread to his bones.

On August 16th, Stuart Granger died. He was 80 years old. Tracy had stepped out of the room for less than ten minutes. There was no Hollywood memorial, just a small private service in Santa Barbara.

The Los Angeles Times ran four paragraphs. The estate papers told the final story: $80,000 in total assets, most of it furniture and personal effects. No property, no investments, no residuals of any consequence. Three marriages to wealthy women, decades of studio contracts, all of it gone.

In the weeks after he died, Tracy began sorting through his estate. In a locked filing cabinet she found boxes of letters, dozens of them, some dating back to the 1940s, letters from men whose names she didn’t recognize. She sat with those boxes for three days. Then she built a fire in the garden behind his house and fed the letters into it, one box at a time, until there was nothing left but ash.

She told a biographer: he spent his whole life trying to control his story. I wasn’t going to take that away from him after he was gone. Jean Simmons died on January 22nd, 2010. She was 80.

At a guild event in 1991, six months after his diagnosis, she had seen Stuart for the last time. He told her she looked exactly the same. She told him to take care of himself. Years later, in an interview for a Turner Classic Movies retrospective, the host asked her about working with Granger.

She paused, looked down at her hands. “He was very lost,” she said. “Nothing more.

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