Farley Granger, who found quick stardom in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” in the 1940s and ’50s but who then turned aside from Hollywood to pursue stage and television roles, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

A spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office said he died of natural causes.

Mr. Granger’s youthful good looks gave him matinee-idol potential, and he was linked romantically to some of the biggest names of the day, of both sexes. But his passion for stage acting and his discontent with the studio system kept him from reaching the Hollywood superstardom of some of his contemporaries. Though he had scores of television and film credits and made a half-dozen Broadway appearances, his best-known performances were two of his earliest: as a preppie thrill-killer in Hitchcock’s “Rope” in 1948, and as a tennis player wrongly suspected of murder in “Strangers on a Train” in 1951.

Mr. Granger was born on July 1, 1925, in San Jose, Calif. His father, also named Farley, owned a car dealership, but the stock market crash killed that business, and, hoping to find work, the senior Mr. Granger took the family to Los Angeles. It was an auspicious move for young Farley, an only child: in 1943 a casting director for Samuel Goldwyn saw him in a play called “The Wookie” at a showcase theater and had him come in for a reading, where the onlookers included Goldwyn and Lillian Hellman.

“The war was on, and men were in short supply,” Mr. Granger recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2007. Not yet 18, he was cast in the film version of Hellman’s “North Star,” playing a resident of a Ukrainian village that is invaded by the Nazis. Then, in 1944, came “The Purple Heart,” about a downed bomber crew, followed by real-life military service in the Navy.