They separated four years later. The break-up was amicable, and the two men remained friends. As Laurents explained, he and Granger simply "grew up and grew apart."

Three years after starring in Rope, Granger again worked with Hitchcock in the classic thriller Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the first novel by acclaimed lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith.

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The actor stars as Guy Haines, a socially ambitious tennis star romantically involved with a senator's daughter while waiting for a divorce from his wife. On a train one day, Haines encounters a psychopath named Bruno Anthony (memorably played by Robert Walker), who seems infatuated with Guy and overly familiar with his romantic entanglements. Smoothly, almost seductively, Bruno suggests the two men "swap" murders--Guy's unfaithful wife for Bruno's hated father. Guy, of course, does not take the proposition seriously, but Bruno does.

Although Hitchcock himself was famously dissatisfied with the final results, laying most the blame on the casting of the lead roles and a weak script, the film was a box office hit and the first major success of Granger's career.

During the early 1950s, Goldwyn attempted to exploit Granger's boyish good looks and turn the actor into a "teen idol." He was subsequently cast in a succession of well-made but ultimately forgettable romantic melodramas, often teamed with Joan Evans, a young actress Goldwyn was, unsuccessfully, grooming for stardom.

Granger's films of this period include Side Street (1950), Our Very Own (1950), Edge of Doom (1950)--in which his character murders a priest--and I Want You (1951). He was also cast in George Beck's ill-conceived comedy Behave Yourself! (1951) about a group of gangsters tangling with a Welsh terrier named Archie. In 1953 he was loaned out to MGM for the amiable but uninspired musical Small Town Girl and the Vincente Minnelli-directed segment of the anthology film The Story of Three Loves.

Granger's final film for Goldwyn was Charles Vidor's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a wholly fabricated biography of the Danish fairytale writer, in which Granger co-starred with Danny Kaye as Andersen. Not surprisingly, Andersen's bisexuality was carefully avoided in the script.

Granger had become discontented with his career at Goldwyn Studios and asked to be released from his contract. Instead, Goldwyn allowed the actor to go to Italy to star in Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954). The film, with dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, is a visually stunning, historical saga of love and betrayal set against the Italian Risorgimento, or struggle for unification and independence, in 1866. Many critics consider Granger's portrayal of a cynical, heartless young Austrian soldier to be perhaps his greatest performance.

Uncertain how to proceed with Granger's film career, Goldwyn finally allowed the actor to buy out his contract upon his return from Italy.

Granger immediately moved to New York and began appearing regularly on television in such anthology shows as Toast of the Town and Kraft Television Theater. His film career, however, stalled. He made only two more films in the 1950s--The Naked Street (1955), as a small-time playboy on death row for murder, and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), playing the sociopath millionaire Harry K. Thaw--and did not appear in any films during the 1960s.

Granger also turned his attention to Broadway, appearing in several memorable productions. As he later explained, "I developed a great love for the theatre. I wanted desperately to work in it. I began more and more to prefer that to film, because I felt you were freer and could do more on stage than in a film."

His first effort on Broadway, however, was less than triumphant. Appearing in First Impressions, a musical based on the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice, Granger played Darcy opposite Polly Bergen's Elizabeth Bennet. The musical opened in March 1959 and closed a scant two months later.

He was much more successful in the 1964 Broadway revivals of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and Arthur Miller's The Crucible, as well as the 1965 revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie as Tom Wingfield.

From 1970 to 1974 Granger appeared in a series of low-budget, Italian-language films with such titles as La rossa dalla pelle che scotta (released in the United States as The Red-Headed Corpse, 1971) and Alla ricerca del piacere (Leather and Whips, 1972).

Granger returned to the United States in the mid-1970s and starred in the soap operas One Life to Live, as Dr. Will Vernon from 1976 to 1977; The Edge of Night, as Trent Archer in 1980; and As the World Turns, as Earl Mitchell from 1986 to 1987. He also appeared on Broadway in 1980 in Ira Levin's successful mystery, Deathtrap.

In 1995 he was one of the on-screen actors interviewed for Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's ground-breaking documentary The Celluloid Closet, discussing the depiction of homosexuality in film, in particular Rope and Strangers on a Train.

Granger continues to act occasionally in theater, television, and film. Most recently, he appeared in the independent film The Next Big Thing (2001), playing an urbane Manhattan art dealer.

He currently resides in New York City.

American television has made significant strides in its portrayal of homosexuals in dramatic series and movies, but cable networks have been more daring than the "big three" broadcast networks.

Treatments of gay relationships on network soap operas have always been limited; recently, however, gays and lesbians have created their own soap operas to tell the convoluted stories of lesbian and gay entanglements.

Although few gay actors have been permitted the luxury of openness, many of them have challenged and helped reconfigure notions of masculinity and, to a lesser extent, of homosexuality.

Queer characters were a crucial component of the film noir landscape, part of the genre's challenge to complacent American values.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual actors and actresses are among the elite of contemporary theater, but only recently have many come out publicly.

Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was probably bisexual in orientation, though he may well have remained a virgin.

Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.

Acclaimed mystery writer Patricia Highsmith is the author of one explicitly lesbian novel, as well as the popular series featuring the amoral bisexual Tom Ripley.

Playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and director, Arthur Laurents brought an independent sensibility to some of the most important works of stage and screen in the post-World War II era.

One of Hollywood's greatest directors, Vincente Minnelli kept his sexual orientation quite private, but his gay sensibility is visible in many of his films.

One of the most significant and influential American movie directors of the twentieth century, Nicholas Ray created characters and situations that continue to resonate with queer viewers.

The arc of the film career of Luchino Visconti, the most contradictory and varied of the major Italian filmmakers, mirrors his increasing openness about his homosexuality.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.