Stewart Granger; Swashbuckling Film Star

Stewart Granger, the dashing star of such adventure films as “The Great White Hunter” and “King Solomon’s Mines,” died Monday at a Santa Monica hospital. He was 80.

Officials at St. Johns Hospital and Health Center said Granger’s death followed a lengthy battle with cancer.

He is survived by three daughters--Tracy, Lindsay and Samantha--and a son, James, hospital officials said.

Born James Lablanche Stewart in Great Britain, the actor made his film debut in the 1933 British production of “A Southern Maid.”

“I hated being called a movie star--it never seemed a very worthwhile thing to be,” Granger told The Times in a 1981 interview. Nonetheless, his career--first in Great Britain and then in the United States--went on to span more than 60 films.

A British screen idol for the first quarter of his career, Granger was virtually unknown in the United States until 1950, when he was cast opposite Deborah Kerr as the intrepid explorer Allan Quartermaine in “King Solomon’s Mines.”

By that time, the actor--who was known to his friends as Jimmy Stewart--had been forced to adopt the stage name of Stewart Granger so fans would not confuse him with the American star.

The role of Quartermaine--a hunter whose aid Kerr enlists in a search for her missing husband--established the tall, green-eyed Granger in Hollywood as a swashbuckling leading man. For the next two decades, he stayed in the United States, starring in such adventure classics as the 1952 remake of “The Prisoner of Zenda” and “Scaramouche.”

He came out of semi-retirement during the 1980s to work in several television movies, appearing in 1991 in an episode of the CBS series “Gabriel’s Fire.”

In his personal life, Granger could be as dashing as some of the leading men he played. Married three times--first to actresses Elspeth March and Jean Simmons, and then to Belgian beauty queen Viviane Lecerf--Granger was so generous that he once bought a mink coat for the girlfriend of a chum because she was feeling a little blue.

In the 1981 Times interview--given to promote his memoirs, “Sparks Fly Upward”--Granger spoke philosophically about his finances and his career.

“I’ve never been clever with money,” he said. “When I was working in Rome in the 1960s, I made more than $1.5 million--a fortune then--and piddled it all away.”

In any case, he said, many of the Hollywood contract stars of his generation were permanently in debt.

“Nowadays, an actor can tell a producer to get lost,” he said. “We couldn’t. . . . The result was we made some bad pictures.” He added: “I’ve never thought much of my films.”

But, he noted, others were more admiring of his work.

“I once said to Spencer Tracy, who was a great friend, ‘I wish I’d made just one film like ‘Inherit the Wind.’ And you know what he said? ‘Jim, I’d love to have done ‘Scaramouche.’ ”