Actor Tony Curtis dies at 85
Matthew Kruk
Actor Tony Curtis dies at 85
Best known for his role in 'Some Like it Hot,' he appeared in more than
100 films and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Defiant Ones.'
By Claudia Luther, Special to the Times
October 1, 2010
Tony Curtis, the dashingly handsome film star of the 1950s and `60s who
is best remembered for his hilarious turn in drag in Billy Wilder's
classic comedy "Some Like It Hot" and for his dramatic roles in "The
Defiant Ones" and "Sweet Smell of Success," died Wednesday night. He was
85.
Curtis died at his Las Vegas home at midnight, ACB News reported,
quoting his business manager and family spokesman, Preston Ahearn.
One of Hollywood's most durable actors, Curtis appeared in more than 100
movies and was nominated for a best actor Oscar for the "The Defiant
Ones," the 1958 convict escape film in which he was chained to his
co-star, Sidney Poitier.
But Curtis failed to receive a nomination for another strong role, one
that he felt sure would finally win him an Academy Award: Albert
DeSalvo, the Boston strangler. That 1968 film with the same name was the
last of Curtis' major starring roles.
"After that, the pictures that I got were not particularly intriguing,"
he told the Seattle Times in 2000, "but I had lots of child-support
payments."
For many film fans, Curtis' most memorable role was in "Some Like It
Hot," the 1959 film in which he and Jack Lemmon played small-time jazz
musicians who witness the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago and,
pursued by gangsters who want to kill them too, pose as women in order
to escape with an all-female jazz band bound for Miami.
In 2000, the American Film Institute named "Some Like It Hot" the best
comedy of the 20th century.
"I feel that he's the great farceur of his generation," said former
Times movie reviewer Kevin Thomas in 2007, citing Curtis' many comedy
roles. But, Thomas said, "he developed tremendous range" as an actor.
Curtis made more than 60 feature and TV films after "The Boston
Strangler," including "The Mirror Crack'd" in 1980 with Angela Lansbury
and a string of forgettable movies such as "The Lobster Man from Mars"
and "The Mummy Lives."
He also appeared numerous times on television sit-coms or dramatic
series or as a talk-show guest. In the late 1960s, he frequently
appeared on shows as "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In."
"I reviewed many of the minor films of his later career," said Thomas,
"and what I came to respect so profoundly was that Tony always gave his
absolute, total best."
Starting out in 1949 as a contract player at Universal, Curtis broke out
as a leading Hollywood actor in 1952 with "Son of Ali Baba." It was,
however, a mixed blessing because the film also made Curtis the lifelong
butt of a joke about his New York accent when he said: "Yonder lies the
castle of my faddah." Rarely did his delivery of this line not come up
during press interviews, but Curtis never saw the humor, saying it was
"not just a put-down of New Yorkers but of Jews."
The actor made the well-regarded "Houdini" in 1953 and from 1956 to 1959
starred in a string of critical and popular hits: "Trapeze," "Mister
Cory," "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Vikings," "Kings Go Forth," "The
Defiant Ones," "The Perfect Furlough," "Some Like It Hot" and "Operation
Petticoat."
His characters varied from swashbuckling heroes to smarmy press agents
and showed, when the role called for it, a genuine comic talent. And his
co-stars were the biggest names in Hollywood: Burt Lancaster, Marilyn
Monroe, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Poitier, Lemmon,
Natalie Wood and - in "The Vikings," "Houdini" and other films - his
first wife, Janet Leigh.
In his later years, Curtis was mostly reduced to being a celebrity
without serious portfolio and this, combined with his early teen-idol
image and a raft of mediocre films he was obligated to do under studio
contract, left him with a reputation that was lighter than many of his
substantial roles during his prime would otherwise support.
But not to Thomas who noted: "He was just as terrific an actor at the
end as he was at the height of his career. I think he loved being a
movie star, and I think he was appreciative of the chance he had to have
the career that he did have; I think that's reflected in the very high
level of his work."
Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, in New York City, the
oldest son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants. His father was a tailor and
his mother raised their three boys. But the family was marked by
tragedy: One of Curtis' brothers was killed at the age of 9 when he was
hit by a truck, and the other, who was 15 years Curtis' junior, suffered
from schizophrenia and was in and out of institutions throughout his
life.
Curtis' early life was a series of struggles - he said he was constantly
taunted for being young, Jewish and handsome. He grew up defending
himself on whatever turf his parents lived on at the time: the East 80s
in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan's Lexington Avenue.
At 17, he enlisted in the Navy, serving in the Pacific during World War
II. After leaving the service, he used the GI Bill for acting classes at
the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in
Manhattan.
That led to some work in the Borscht Belt in the Catskills and later to
the Yiddish theater in Chicago. He ended up back in New York doing "The
Golden Boy" at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
It was there that he was spotted by a Hollywood talent scout and, by age
23, was under contract with Universal for $75 a week.
"I got into movies so easy it was scary," he told the Denver Post in
1996.
He changed his first name to Anthony and his last to Curtis - an
Anglicized version of a Hungarian family name, Kertész. But before long,
he was known simply as Tony Curtis.
One of the first things Curtis did on arriving in Hollywood was to learn
to drive and then buy a convertible.
"Those days were great," he told the Daily Telegraph of London in 2001
about his early years in Hollywood. "The top down, the car door open.
"At these parties thrown by the studio, there'd always be a brand new
sweetie for me. I was the king of the hill then. And I didn't leave a
skirt unmoved."
He reveled in his "pretty boy" image regularly being mobbed by teenage
fans.
His acting career got its first boost with a bit part as a gigolo in the
1949 movie "Criss Cross," in which he did a brief dancing scene with the
star, Yvonne de Carlo, that brought in a rash of fan letters. Soon
Curtis had a bigger role in "City Across the River."
He made standard studio fare for many years for Universal, finally
getting better roles when he linked up with powerhouse agent Lew
Wasserman. After that he starred with Lancaster in two well regarded
films, "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Trapeze."
In "Sweet Smell of Success," he played slimy publicist Sidney Falco to
Lancaster's evil and all-powerful gossip columnist, J.J. Hunsecker.
"Curtis makes Sidney's naked ambition so tangible you can almost feel
his clammy palms, and it's Curtis' unsentimental, caffeinated study in
amorality that gives 'Sweet Smell' its potent, bitter aftertaste,"
Entertainment Weekly said in a 2002 listing of the 100 best performances
not nominated for an Oscar.
Ernest Lehman, who wrote the story on which the movie was based and
later wrote the screenplays for many notable films, said in 2001 that he
viewed Curtis' performance in "Sweet Smell" to be "one of the best
performances by a male actor in the movies. Still gets me."
In 1959, Curtis starred in two of his best films, "The Defiant Ones" and
"Some Like It Hot."
Curtis got fully into the role of Josephine in "Some Like It Hot." While
Lemmon in female makeup conceded he looked a lot like his own mother,
Curtis went for glamour, perfecting a sexy pout.
"I was more like Grace Kelly than like my mother," he said of Josephine.
Director Wilder gave Curtis credit for one of the film's funniest
scenes: the one in which Josephine reverts to being Joe and pretends to
be a wealthy playboy in order to woo Sugar Kane (Monroe), the sultry
singer in the women's jazz band. The scene takes place aboard a borrowed
yacht.
In an interview for Curtis' autobiography, Wilder said he told Curtis
that after his character had stolen the yachtsman's clothes in order to
romance Monroe, he had to talk differently, "not the English of a
Brooklyn musician."
Curtis offered to do Cary Grant, which he had learned from repeatedly
watching "Gunga Din," the only movie aboard ship for a time while he was
in the Navy.
"And it was a huge, wonderful plus for the picture," Wilder said. "I did
not know he could do such a perfect imitation."
In 1960, Curtis starred with Douglas in the swashbuckling "Spartacus," a
box-office hit that was also notable for the bathtub scene that didn't
appear in the original but was restored in the 1991 re-release. In the
scene, Laurence Olivier, playing a Roman general, tries to seduce
Curtis, the young slave, in dialogue alluding to one's preference for
oysters or snails. (Because the original scene had not been properly
recorded, Anthony Hopkins dubbed the dialogue for Olivier, who died in
1989. "I did me," Curtis said of the restoration.)
Also during the '60s, Curtis played multiple roles in "The Great
Impostor" and he had to choose between the love of the Cossacks and the
love of his life in "Taras Bulba." He played a neurotic orderly in
"Captain Newman, M.D.," was the white-suited daredevil in "The Great
Race" and a killer in "The Boston Strangler."
Unlike many who rose to his heights only to decry having to live their
lives in a fishbowl, Curtis enjoyed fame and its accouterments.
Writing in his autobiography, Curtis said he was able to handle the
adulation of fans because, "I'd had that all my life, even before I got
into movies; in school, in the neighborhoods where I lived, always a lot
of furor. Everybody liked the way I looked, including myself."
Norman Jewison, who directed Curtis in the 1962 film, "40 Pounds of
Trouble," said that Curtis' simple belief that the camera loved him
"gave his work a distinctive quality."
"He never got uptight, never lost control," Jewison wrote in his 2005
autobiography, "This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me." "He was
always totally cool."
Movies, Curtis once said, gave him "the privilege to be an aristocrat,
to be a prince."
Throughout Curtis' life, women loved him, and he loved women. He was
reportedly married six times, most famously to actress Janet Leigh in
1951, in the Hollywood marriage of their era - bigger than Debbie and
Eddie and long before Liz and Dick. The Curtises were married 11 years.
In 1984, after family and friends intervened to talk about his drug
problem, he admitted himself to the Betty Ford Center at Eisenhower
Memorial Center in Rancho Mirage, Ca.
Curtis had the foresight to get a percentage of his movies when that
wasn't common practice, and he later said that he had 34 movies that he
collected on. He said he had made $2.5 million on "Some Like It Hot"
alone.
"I'm telling you, I'm lucky to be me," the former Bernie Schwartz told a
Buffalo News reporter in 1993. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be Tony
Curtis, and that's exactly who I am."
Luther is a former Times staff writer.
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