Andy Robustelli, the Giants’ Hall of Fame defensive end in their glory years of the late 1950s and early ’60s, when shouts of “DEE-fense” rang from the stands at Yankee Stadium, died on Tuesday in Stamford, Conn., his hometown. He was 85.

His death, at Stamford Hospital, resulted from complications of recent bladder surgery, a daughter-in-law, Terry Robustelli, said.

In the autumn of 1956, the Giants, one of the N.F.L.’s oldest franchises, finally vied with baseball’s Yankees as a glamour attraction on New York’s sports scene. The Giants’ offense featured stars like Charlie Conerly, Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote, Alex Webster and Roosevelt Brown.

But it was the defensive alignment, featuring Robustelli, Roosevelt Grier, Dick Modzelewski and Jim Katcavage on the line, Sam Huff at middle linebacker, and a secondary led by Emlen Tunnell, that captured the fans’ imagination. They evoked a celebrity aura, captured in the television documentary “The Violent World of Sam Huff.”

“Never in the history of football had fans gone to a stadium to root for a ‘DEE-fense,’ ” Gifford, a Hall of Fame halfback and receiver, recalled in his memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards.”

Robustelli was a 19th-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Rams in 1951 out of tiny Arnold College in Milford, Conn., but he became a hard-hitting tackler, at 6 feet 1 inch and 230 pounds, and a superb pass-rusher with a keen sense of how an opponent’s plays were developing.

He played in eight N.F.L. championship games, two with the Rams and six with the Giants after joining them in 1956. He was a first-team All-Pro six times, received the Maxwell Club’s Bert Bell Award as the N.F.L.’s most outstanding player in 1962 and recovered 22 fumbles. He missed only one game in his 14 seasons, in the last three doubling as a Giants assistant. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971.

In 1974, Robustelli joined the Giants’ front office as director of operations, essentially the general manager, and tried with little success to rebuild a losing team before leaving the post in 1978.

Robustelli, at right end, was part of a storied Giants defensive line that included Grier at right tackle, Modzelewski at left tackle and Katcavage at left end. They played together from 1956 to 1962, a remarkable stretch for a unit in football’s trenches.

“We didn’t want — we were afraid — to have substitutions, afraid they’d take our job away,” Robustelli told Gerald Eskenazi, a reporter for The New York Times, in his book “There Were Giants in Those Days.”

“We just didn’t want anybody else to have a shot at it, so we stayed in there all the time.”

Tom Landry, the Giants’ defensive coordinator in Robustelli’s heyday, remembered his devotion to the game.

“He put more book time into his work than the others,” The Hartford Courant once quoted Landry as saying. “He thought all the time. Not just on the field, but in his room, at the dining table.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Gifford said: “Whereas Tom was the overall defensive coach, Andy basically ran the defensive line along with the linebackers. He was the leader in the clubhouse. He was quiet, but when Andy talked, everyone listened.”

Andrew Richard Robustelli was born on Dec. 6, 1925, in Stamford, where his father, Lucien, was a barber, and his mother, Katie, was a seamstress.

He played football, basketball and baseball at Stamford High School, served in the Navy during World War II, then played end on offense and defense at Arnold, a school with only a few hundred students. (It was later absorbed by the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.)

As a rookie with the Rams, Robustelli had virtually no chance of beating out the star receivers Tom Fears and Crazy Legs Hirsch but won a job at defensive end for the Rams team that captured the 1951 N.F.L. championship.

When he was traded to the Giants in 1956, he became a key figure in a 4-3 alignment — four down linemen and three linebackers — installed by Landry.

The Giants defeated the Chicago Bears, 47-7, in the 1956 N.F.L. championship game on a frozen Yankee Stadium field, aided by sneakers from Robustelli’s sporting goods store in Stamford. They won five division titles between 1958 and 1963 but lost in the championship game each time.

After retiring as a player at the end of the 1964 season, Robustelli expanded his business interests, opening a travel agency and a sports marketing business in Stamford. Ten years later, on his return to the Giants as director of operations, he inherited a team that had won only two games the previous season.

He soon hired Bill Arnsparger, the architect of the Miami Dolphins’ defense, to replace Webster, the former Giants halfback, as head coach, but the Giants continued to founder.

Their woes climaxed in November 1978 with “the fumble,” a botched Giants handoff that was run into the end zone by the Philadelphia Eagles’ Herm Edwards for a game-winning touchdown on the final play. John McVay, who had replaced Arnsparger two years earlier, was fired after that season, and Robustelli, who had been planning to leave, returned to his business interests after five losing seasons.

Robustelli is survived by his sons Richard, Robert, Thomas, Christopher, Michael and John; his daughters Laura Salvatore, Andra Compo and Tina Salvatore; 29 grandchildren; and 6 great-grandchildren. His wife, Jeanne, died in April.

Long after his playing days ended, Robustelli reflected on his celebrated teammates, recalling a spirited rivalry between the offensive players and the defense. “I don’t think the two ever got close,” he told The Times in 1985.

As for the defense’s mystique, Gifford wrote in his memoir how “everyone knew who Andy Robustelli was, and that he had a wife and three kids and lived in Connecticut,” and how “Sam Huff even made the cover of Time magazine.”

“If they made one of their famous goal-line stands, we’d hear about it for a week,” Gifford remembered. “Or if they recovered a fumble, Sam might walk by me as I started onto the field and say, ‘See if you can hold ’em for a while.’ ”

Andrew R Robustelli