BBC News
4 October 2010 Last updated at 17:09 ET
Tony Curtis: Hundreds bid farewell at actor's funeral
Around 400 fans, celebrities, friends, and family members have bid a final farewell to actor Tony Curtis at a funeral chapel in Las Vegas.
Funeral attendees bowed their heads and clasped their hands during a series of Jewish prayers.
The crowd then laughed at a film tribute to the actor, as a screen flashed clips from The Flintstones cartoon and the movie Spartacus.
The film star died last week, aged 85, after suffering a cardiac arrest.
Mourners waited outside Palm Mortuary & Cemetery well before the funeral began at 11am local time (1800 GMT).
Tony Curtis's wife, Jill, eulogised her husband of 16 years, adding he was laid to rest in his favourite scarf and driving gloves.
Jamie Lee Curtis, his daughter from his first marriage to Psycho actress Janet Leigh, became emotional as she described her father, saying he was a "little mashugana" - using the Yiddish word for crazy.
"All of us got something from him. I, of course, got his desperate need for attention," Ms Curtis said.
Entertainer Richard Little was one of many celebrity guests at the funeral
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger remembered Mr Curtis as a mentor who encouraged his film career, when others told him his accent and name would prevent him from succeeding in Hollywood.
"You are going to make it. Don't pay any attention to those guys. I heard the same thing when I came here," Mr Schwarzenegger said, remembering Mr Curtis's words.
Friend and pallbearer Gene Kilroy said that Mr Curtis had a way of making other people feel "like they were Spartacus".
Mr Kilroy said billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian and actor Kirk Douglas were among seven honorary pallbearers at the funeral.
Oscar nomination
Mr Curtis died at his home in Henderson, Nevada, on Wednesday.
The Oscar-nominated actor starred in Some Like it Hot opposite Marilyn Monroe.
He received an Oscar nod in 1959 for The Defiant Ones, in which he starred with Sidney Poitier.
His career spanned six decades and he made more than 120 films including Trapeze, Spartacus and The Vikings.
Curtis served in World War II before he began his film career
Born Bernard Schwartz on 3 June 1925 in New York, the actor served in World War II before taking on the name Tony Curtis when he began his film career in 1949.
In the 1970s he turned to television, starring in a number of TV series including The Persuaders! opposite Sir Roger Moore, and Michael Mann's Vegas.
The actor was married six times.
He is survived by his wife, Jill Vandenberg Curtis, and six children.
R.I.P. Tony Curtis
NYTimes
September 30, 2010
Tony Curtis, Hollywood Icon, Dies at 85
By DAVE KEHR
Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who earned an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones,” but whose public preferred him in comic roles in films like “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Great Race” (1965), died Wednesday of a cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by the Clark County coroner, The Associated Press reported.
As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator ( Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond ( Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).
But behind the pretty-boy looks could be found a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability, both likely products of his Dickensian childhood in the Bronx. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store, the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)
In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard frequently found himself caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility; as he recalled in many interviews, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things. In 1938, Julius Schwartz was hit by a truck and killed.
In search of stability, Bernard made his way to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During World War II he served in the Navy aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus. His ship was present in Tokyo Bay for the formal surrender of Japan aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, which Signalman Schwartz watched through a pair of binoculars. “That was one of the great moments in my life,” he later wrote.
Back in New York, he enrolled in acting classes in the workshop headed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, where one of his colleagues was another Seward alumnus, Walter Matthau. He began getting work with theater companies in the Catskills and caught the eye of the New York casting agent Joyce Selznick, who helped him win a contract with Universal Pictures in 1948. After experimenting with James Curtis, he settled on Anthony Curtis as his stage name and began turning up in bit parts in films like Robert Siodmak’s “Criss Cross” (1949), Arthur Lubin’s “Francis” (1950) and Anthony Mann’s “Winchester ’73,” alongside another Universal bit player, Rock Hudson.
At first, Mr. Curtis’s career advanced more rapidly than Hudson’s. He was promoted to supporting player, billed as Tony Curtis for the first time, in the 1950 western “Kansas Raiders” and became, he recalled, first prize in a Universal promotional contest, “Win a Weekend With Tony Curtis.” With his next film, the Technicolor Arabian Nights adventure “The Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951), he received top billing. His co-star was Piper Laurie, another offspring of Jewish immigrants (born Rosetta Jacobs), with whom he was paired in three subsequent films at Universal, including Douglas Sirk’s “No Room for the Groom,” a 1952 comedy that allowed Mr. Curtis to explore his comic gifts for the first time.
In 1951 Mr. Curtis married the ravishing MGM contract player Janet Leigh, whose beauty rivaled his own. The highly photogenic couple soon became a favorite of the fan magazines, and their first movie together, George Marshall’s “Houdini” (1953), was also Mr. Curtis’s first substantial hit. Perhaps the character of Houdini like Mr. Curtis, a handsome young man of Hungarian Jewish ancestry who reinvented himself through show business touched something in Mr. Curtis; in any case, it was in that film that his most consistent screen personality, the eager young outsider who draws on his charm and wiles to achieve success in the American mainstream, was born.
Mr. Curtis endured several more Universal costume pictures, including the infamous 1954 film “The Black Shield of Falworth,” in which he co-starred with Ms. Leigh but did not utter the line, “Yondah lies da castle of my foddah,” that legend has attributed to him. His career seemed stalled until Burt Lancaster, another actor who survived a difficult childhood in New York City, took him under his wing.
Lancaster cast Mr. Curtis as his protégé, a circus performer who becomes his romantic rival, in his company’s 1956 production “Trapeze.” But it was Mr. Curtis’s next co-starring appearance with Lancaster as the hustling Broadway press agent Sidney Falco, desperately eager to ingratiate himself with Lancaster’s sadistic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) that proved Mr. Curtis could be an actor of genuine power and subtlety.
The late ’50s and early ’60s proved to be Mr. Curtis’s heyday. Taking his career into his own hands, he formed a production company, Curtleigh Productions, and in partnership with Kirk Douglas assembled the 1958 independent feature “The Vikings” a rousing adventure film, directed by Richard Fleischer, that has become an enduring favorite. Later in 1958, the producer-director Stanley Kramer cast Mr. Curtis in “The Defiant Ones,” as a prisoner who escapes from a Southern chain gang while chained to a fellow convict, who happens to be black ( Sidney Poitier). The film may seem schematic and simplistic today, but at the time of its release it spoke with hope to a nation in the violent first stages of the civil rights movement and was rewarded with nine Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Curtis as best actor. It was the only acknowledgment he received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his career.
Mr. Curtis began a creatively rewarding relationship with the director Blake Edwards with a semi-autobiographical role as a young hustler working a Wisconsin resort in “Mister Cory” (1957), which was followed by two hugely successful 1959 military comedies, both co-starring Ms. Leigh: “The Perfect Furlough” and “Operation Petticoat,” in which he played a submarine officer serving under a captain played by Cary Grant. Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” another 1959 release, Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, attempts to seduce a voluptuous singer ( Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend ( Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.
Success in comedy kindled Mr. Curtis’s ambitions as a dramatic actor. He appeared in Mr. Douglas’s epic production of “Spartacus,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, and reached unsuccessfully for another Oscar nomination in “The Outsider” (1961), directed by Delbert Mann, as Ira Hayes, a Native American who helped to raise the flag at Iwo Jima. In “The Great Impostor,” directed by Robert Mulligan, he played a role closer to his established screen personality: an ambitious young man from the wrong side of the tracks who fakes his way through a series of professions, including a monk, a prison warden and a surgeon.
Mr. Curtis’s popularity was damaged by his divorce from Ms. Leigh in 1962, following an affair with the 17-year-old German actress Christine Kaufmann, who was his co-star in the costume epic “Taras Bulba.” He retreated into comedies, playing out his long association with Universal in a series of undistinguished efforts including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Captain Newman M.D.” (1963) and the disastrous “Wild and Wonderful” (1964), in which he co-starred with Ms. Kaufmann, whom he married in 1963. In “The Great Race,” Blake Edwards’s 1965 celebration of slapstick comedy, Mr. Curtis parodied himself as an impossibly handsome daredevil named the Great Leslie, and in 1967 he reunited with Alexander Mackendrick, the director of “Sweet Smell of Success,” for an enjoyable satire on California mores, “Don’t Make Waves.”
Mr. Curtis made one final, ambitious attempt to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor with “The Boston Strangler” in 1968, putting on weight to play the suspected serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Again under Richard Fleischer’s direction, he turned in an effective, rigorously deglamorized performance, but the film was dismissed as exploitative in many quarters (“An incredible collapse of taste, judgment, decency, prose, insight, journalism and movie technique,” Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times), and failed to reignite Mr. Curtis’s fading career. He divorced Ms. Kaufmann and married a 23-year-old model, Leslie Allen, that same year.
After two unsuccessful efforts to establish himself in series television, “The Persuaders” (1971-72) and “McCoy” (1975-76), Mr. Curtis found himself in a seemingly endless series of guest appearances on television (he had a recurring role on “Vegas” from 1978 to 1981) and supporting performances in ever more unfortunate movies, including Mae West’s excruciating 1978 comeback attempt, “Sextette.” A stay at the Betty Ford Center followed his 1982 divorce from Ms. Allen, but Mr. Curtis never lost his work ethic. He continued to appear regularly in low-budget movies (he played a movie mogul in the spoof “Lobster Man From Mars,” 1989) and occasionally in independent films of quality ( Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 “Insignificance,” opposite Theresa Russell as a Monroe-like actress). He took up painting, selling his boldly signed Matisse-influenced canvases through galleries and department stores.
After divorcing Ms. Allen, Mr. Curtis was married to the actress Andrea Savio (1984-92) and, briefly, to the lawyer Lisa Deutsch (1993-94). He married his sixth wife, the horse trainer Jill VandenBerg, in 1998, and with her operated Shiloh Horse Rescue, a nonprofit refuge for abused and neglected horses, in Sandy Valley, Nev.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Curtis is survived by Kelly Lee Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, his two daughters with Janet Leigh; Alexandra Curtis and Allegra Curtis, his two daughters with Christine Kaufmann; and a son, Benjamin Curtis, with Leslie Allen. A second son with Ms. Allen, Nicholas Curtis, died in 1994 of a drug overdose.
He published “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography,” written with Barry Paris, in 1994 and a second autobiography, “American Prince: A Memoir,” written with Peter Golenbock, in 2008. In 2002 he toured in a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” in which he played the role of the love-addled millionaire originated by Joe E. Brown in the film. This time, the curtain line was his: “Nobody’s perfect.” His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.
Tony Curtis, star of 'Some Like It Hot' and 'Sweet Smell of Success,' dies at 85
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 30, 2010; 6:38 AM
Tony Curtis, an actor who rose to movie stardom in the 1950s by blending street attitude with near-pretty looks, gave compelling dramatic performances in "Sweet Smell of Success" and "The Defiant Ones" and became a comic icon as a cross-dressing Jazz Age musician in "Some Like It Hot," died of cardiac arrest Wednesday at his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.
Mr. Curtis was a veteran of more than 100 films of wildly varying quality. But his charismatic leading roles in "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) and "Some Like It Hot" (1959) -- often ranked, respectively, among the finest dramas and comedies ever made -- assured him high regard among generations of moviewatchers and scholars.
After a hardscrabble childhood, Mr. Curtis realized his looks could be an escape to a better life, and his sex appeal launched his career in the late 1940s. But within a few years, the protective studio system that had nurtured him as a teenage heartthrob collapsed.
"The significant thing is that he did not disappear," said film historian Jeanine D. Basinger. "He made the transition because he actually had more than just a pretty face. He understood the situation he was in very clearly. He was a very intelligent boy from the streets. He was street smart, and he got business-smart."
Mr. Curtis sustained a career for more than five decades and surprised reviewers with his deft handling of a wide range of characters.
When he first came to Hollywood, Mr. Curtis was among the young beefcake performers, including Rock Hudson, hired by Universal-International Pictures after World War II. Mr. Curtis was cast in fantasy and action films such as "Son of Ali Baba" (1952) and "The Black Shield of Falworth" (1954).
His greasy, ducktail hairdo, electric blue eyes and an athletic build won him a following, particularly among young fans. Yet, those early swashbuckling roles also prompted a lingering joke -- that he made awful dialogue worse with his Bronx accent. "Yonda lies da castle of my foddah," he was said to have spoken one typical line.
In 1951, Mr. Curtis attracted a lot of press attention by marrying a co-star, Janet Leigh, the first of his six wives. Leigh, best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), and Mr. Curtis became one of the world's most glamorous couples. One of their daughters, Jamie Lee Curtis, also became an actress.
Mr. Curtis's image was reproduced in magazines, and his clothing was torn at by enthusiastic female fans whenever he made public appearances. An official in the studio's fashion department made him a special suit designed to give easily whenever an admirer pulled at its buttons.
By the mid-1950s, with the studio system ending because of deregulation, Mr. Curtis embraced the changing business climate and began an active freelancing career. It was at this time that his ambition for better film roles became clear.
His first movie part of widely acknowledged distinction was "Trapeze" (1956), which allowed him to combine his athleticism with emotional depth. He played the protege of circus acrobat Burt Lancaster, who is also his rival for the attentions of Gina Lollobrigida.
"The surprise is the depth and force of Tony Curtis," reviewer Alton Cook wrote in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. "The snarling frenzy with which he meets misfortune is both pathetic and ruthless."
Lancaster, who produced the movie, hired him again for "Sweet Smell of Success," which bombed with the public but was later regarded as an acid masterpiece. Mr. Curtis was Sidney Falco, a publicist who sheds all dignity to ingratiate himself with a powerful columnist modeled on Walter Winchell and played by Lancaster.
In 1959, Mr. Curtis received his only Academy Award nomination, in Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" (1958), a powerfully provocative film at the time. He portrayed a Southern bigot who escapes from prison chained to a black convict (played by Sidney Poitier). Poitier always credited Mr. Curtis for insisting that the black actor get his first star billing.
Mr. Curtis gave a chilling performance as convicted rapist and serial killer Albert DeSalvo in the documentary-style "The Boston Strangler" (1968). Mr. Curtis considered this his most demanding part -- he put on 30 pounds, wore heavy boots that slowed his walk and used other prosthetics to give him the creepy gaze of a murderer.
He was deeply upset when he was overlooked for an Oscar nomination. He said he was not respected among many of his peers, calling himself a "stepson in my profession."
Earlier, he had expressed anger after being denied an Oscar nomination for Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot." He and Jack Lemmon (who was Oscar-nominated for his part), played 1920s jazz musicians who disguise themselves as women in an all-girl band after witnessing a mob slaying.
Mr. Curtis had a triple role: a womanizing jazz saxophonist named Joe, who rechristens himself "Josephine" in the female orchestra and also pretends to be a sexually unresponsive oil heir in order to entice a golddigging singer (played by Marilyn Monroe).
Mr. Curtis rendered the millionaire as an affectionate parody of Cary Grant, whom he had idolized since childhood. He received some of the best reviews of his career. Movie critic David Thomson called Mr. Curtis "the subtlest thing in that outrageous film" and "more cunningly feminine than Lemmon."
Film historian Robert Osborne said Mr. Curtis's performance in "Some Like It Hot" was "so wonderful and such a surprise" and the movie is held in such high regard that it overcomes a later downward spiral of his career.
Over the years, Mr. Curtis had some isolated moments of distinction. He played a wheeler-dealer in the Blake Edwards comedy "Operation Petticoat" (1959) with Grant and in "Captain Newman, M.D." (1963) with Gregory Peck. He also was memorable as American Indian war hero Ira Hayes in "The Outsider" (1961) and the nubile "singer of songs" in "Spartacus" (1960), appearing in the sexually tinged bathtub scene with Laurence Olivier.
However, reviewers considered Mr. Curtis greatly out of place as Yul Brynner's Cossack son in "Taras Bulba" (1962), set in 16th-century Ukraine. He further squandered much of the 1960s in comedies like "Boeing-Boeing" with Jerry Lewis, "Not With My Wife, You Don't!" and "Arrivederci, Baby!" (also known as "Drop Dead, Darling").
In the 1970s, he turned to television and film projects such as "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan" (1978) and "The Manitou" (1978), a thriller about which he later wrote, "some 400-year-old evil spirit decides to reincarnate itself on Susan Strasberg's neck."
He also had a minor role in Mae West's final movie, "Sextette" (1978), and played "Col. Iago" in "Othello, el comando negro" (1982), a film very loosely based on the Shakespeare play.
Mr. Curtis attributed his long career slump to alcohol and cocaine addictions spurred by alimony payments to his ex-wives and anger toward his peers, whom he felt never accepted him as an actor.
In 1980, his erratic behavior led to his firing during stage tryouts of Neil Simon's "I Ought to Be in Pictures." A stay at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., reportedly helped him wean off drugs in the mid-1980s. In 1994, his son Nicholas, from his third marriage, died of a heroin overdose.
Mr. Curtis attributed his own recovery to the energy that he put into drawing and painting. He continued acting and remained an earthy presence on the talk-show circuit.
He openly discussed his bedroom prowess and once moved into the Playboy Mansion. "The only leading lady I didn't have an affair with was Jack Lemmon," he once joked.
Mr. Curtis, the son of Jewish-Hungarian immigrants, was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, in Manhattan. He was the oldest of three sons, one of whom was fatally struck by a truck. His other brother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
"My mother abused me a lot, slapped me around," Mr. Curtis once said. He added that his father, a tailor, "was a depressed man, always sewing."
An undistinguished student, he left high school in 1943 and served in a noncombat Navy role on Guam during World War II.
He said he knew as a teenager that his looks could help him escape an otherwise bleak life. He joined a theater group at a local YMCA at 15, and on the G.I. Bill after the war, he enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop run by Erwin Piscator in New York.
His classmates included Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte and Bea Arthur, but Mr. Curtis had the most immediate good fortune. Within months, a Universal-International talent scout, struck by Mr. Curtis's appearance, signed him to a seven-year contract.
Universal was not among the most prestigious of studios, but it did have one advantage. "You could be good-looking but not much else and could get a job immediately," film historian Osborne said. "It was really perfect for Curtis."
Bernard Schwartz changed his name to Tony Curtis because of a Hungarian ancestor with the last name Kertesz. He was put through dramatic and physical training and became a skilled fencer. He also made a point of approaching starlets with the line, "I've been assigned by Universal to teach you how to kiss."
At first, Mr. Curtis appeared in small roles, such as a gigolo who dances "Brazilian Rhapsody" with Yvonne De Carlo in "Criss Cross" (1948).
He began to attract female fan letters, and Universal gave him his first starring role, in 1951, with "The Prince Who Was a Thief" opposite Piper Laurie. The film was immensely profitable and confirmed to studio executives Mr. Curtis's sexual appeal.
He went to race cars in "Johnny Dark" (1954), boxed in "Flesh and Fury" (1952) and showed his comic potential in Douglas Sirk's underrated "No Room for the Groom" (1952). He also was in a musical, "So This Is Paris" (1955), and played the title role in the movie biography "Houdini" (1953), about the escape artist Harry Houdini, with Janet Leigh as his screen wife.
Mr. Curtis was continually at the top of popularity polls, but he became increasingly unsparing in his comments about Hollywood. To a reporter who asked what it was like making love to Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like It Hot," he said, in a much-repeated line, that it was "like kissing Hitler."
He later said the comment was meant flippantly and partly in frustration to Monroe's inconsiderate behavior on the set, but it came to symbolize Mr. Curtis's unpredictability. His 1970 arrest at London's Heathrow Airport for marijuana possession, while making the British television series "The Persuaders!" with Roger Moore, was seen as further evidence of why his bankability plummeted.
Mr. Curtis began a long career in secondary roles -- among them, the impotent star in "The Last Tycoon" (1976), a Joe McCarthy-like senator in Nicolas Roeg's 1985 film "Insignificance" and gangster Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV film "Mafia Princess."
Doubleday published his Hollywood-based novel, "Kid Andrew Cody and Julie Sparrow" in 1977 but sued him over what the company considered an unacceptably bad second work of fiction. After losing an appeal, Mr. Curtis was ordered to repay the $50,000 advance.
Despite such setbacks, he was always accessible to the media and bared most of the strains and pleasures of his life in a 1993 memoir written with Barry Paris. His marriages to Janet Leigh, Christine Kaufmann, Leslie Allen, Andrea Savio and Lisa Deutsch ended in divorce.
Mr. Curtis told the London Independent in 1996: "Movies have given me the privilege to be an aristocrat, to be the prince. It gets me great tables at restaurants, beautiful cars to drive around in, a lovely woman to take out to dinner, to sit around and talk with some of the most intelligent brains that are around, to be recognized everywhere, to be loved by so many people, to lie here in bed, turn on the television, and there I am."
9/30/2010
latimes.com
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, ABC 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.
September 30, 2010
Tony Curtis, Hollywood Icon, Dies at 85
By DAVE KEHR
Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who earned an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones,” but whose public preferred him in comic roles in films like “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Great Race” (1965), died Wednesday of a cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by the Clark County coroner, The Associated Press reported.
As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator ( Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond ( Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).
But behind the pretty-boy looks could be found a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability, both likely products of his Dickensian childhood in the Bronx. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store, the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)
In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard frequently found himself caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility; as he recalled in many interviews, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things. In 1938, Julius Schwartz was hit by a truck and killed.
In search of stability, Bernard made his way to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During World War II he served in the Navy aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus. His ship was present in Tokyo Bay for the formal surrender of Japan aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, which Signalman Schwartz watched through a pair of binoculars. “That was one of the great moments in my life,” he later wrote.
Back in New York, he enrolled in acting classes in the workshop headed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, where one of his colleagues was another Seward alumnus, Walter Matthau. He began getting work with theater companies in the Catskills and caught the eye of the New York casting agent Joyce Selznick, who helped him win a contract with Universal Pictures in 1948. After experimenting with James Curtis, he settled on Anthony Curtis as his stage name and began turning up in bit parts in films like Robert Siodmak’s “Criss Cross” (1949), Arthur Lubin’s “Francis” (1950) and Anthony Mann’s “Winchester ’73,” alongside another Universal bit player, Rock Hudson.
At first, Mr. Curtis’s career advanced more rapidly than Hudson’s. He was promoted to supporting player, billed as Tony Curtis for the first time, in the 1950 western “Kansas Raiders” and became, he recalled, first prize in a Universal promotional contest, “Win a Weekend With Tony Curtis.” With his next film, the Technicolor Arabian Nights adventure “The Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951), he received top billing. His co-star was Piper Laurie, another offspring of Jewish immigrants (born Rosetta Jacobs), with whom he was paired in three subsequent films at Universal, including Douglas Sirk’s “No Room for the Groom,” a 1952 comedy that allowed Mr. Curtis to explore his comic gifts for the first time.
In 1951 Mr. Curtis married the ravishing MGM contract player Janet Leigh, whose beauty rivaled his own. The highly photogenic couple soon became a favorite of the fan magazines, and their first movie together, George Marshall’s “Houdini” (1953), was also Mr. Curtis’s first substantial hit. Perhaps the character of Houdini like Mr. Curtis, a handsome young man of Hungarian Jewish ancestry who reinvented himself through show business touched something in Mr. Curtis; in any case, it was in that film that his most consistent screen personality, the eager young outsider who draws on his charm and wiles to achieve success in the American mainstream, was born.
Mr. Curtis endured several more Universal costume pictures, including the infamous 1954 film “The Black Shield of Falworth,” in which he co-starred with Ms. Leigh but did not utter the line, “Yondah lies da castle of my foddah,” that legend has attributed to him. His career seemed stalled until Burt Lancaster, another actor who survived a difficult childhood in New York City, took him under his wing.
Lancaster cast Mr. Curtis as his protégé, a circus performer who becomes his romantic rival, in his company’s 1956 production “Trapeze.” But it was Mr. Curtis’s next co-starring appearance with Lancaster as the hustling Broadway press agent Sidney Falco, desperately eager to ingratiate himself with Lancaster’s sadistic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) that proved Mr. Curtis could be an actor of genuine power and subtlety.
The late ’50s and early ’60s proved to be Mr. Curtis’s heyday. Taking his career into his own hands, he formed a production company, Curtleigh Productions, and in partnership with Kirk Douglas assembled the 1958 independent feature “The Vikings” a rousing adventure film, directed by Richard Fleischer, that has become an enduring favorite. Later in 1958, the producer-director Stanley Kramer cast Mr. Curtis in “The Defiant Ones,” as a prisoner who escapes from a Southern chain gang while chained to a fellow convict, who happens to be black ( Sidney Poitier). The film may seem schematic and simplistic today, but at the time of its release it spoke with hope to a nation in the violent first stages of the civil rights movement and was rewarded with nine Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Curtis as best actor. It was the only acknowledgment he received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his career.
Mr. Curtis began a creatively rewarding relationship with the director Blake Edwards with a semi-autobiographical role as a young hustler working a Wisconsin resort in “Mister Cory” (1957), which was followed by two hugely successful 1959 military comedies, both co-starring Ms. Leigh: “The Perfect Furlough” and “Operation Petticoat,” in which he played a submarine officer serving under a captain played by Cary Grant. Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” another 1959 release, Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, attempts to seduce a voluptuous singer ( Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend ( Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.
Success in comedy kindled Mr. Curtis’s ambitions as a dramatic actor. He appeared in Mr. Douglas’s epic production of “Spartacus,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, and reached unsuccessfully for another Oscar nomination in “The Outsider” (1961), directed by Delbert Mann, as Ira Hayes, a Native American who helped to raise the flag at Iwo Jima. In “The Great Impostor,” directed by Robert Mulligan, he played a role closer to his established screen personality: an ambitious young man from the wrong side of the tracks who fakes his way through a series of professions, including a monk, a prison warden and a surgeon.
Mr. Curtis’s popularity was damaged by his divorce from Ms. Leigh in 1962, following an affair with the 17-year-old German actress Christine Kaufmann, who was his co-star in the costume epic “Taras Bulba.” He retreated into comedies, playing out his long association with Universal in a series of undistinguished efforts including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Captain Newman M.D.” (1963) and the disastrous “Wild and Wonderful” (1964), in which he co-starred with Ms. Kaufmann, whom he married in 1963. In “The Great Race,” Blake Edwards’s 1965 celebration of slapstick comedy, Mr. Curtis parodied himself as an impossibly handsome daredevil named the Great Leslie, and in 1967 he reunited with Alexander Mackendrick, the director of “Sweet Smell of Success,” for an enjoyable satire on California mores, “Don’t Make Waves.”
Mr. Curtis made one final, ambitious attempt to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor with “The Boston Strangler” in 1968, putting on weight to play the suspected serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Again under Richard Fleischer’s direction, he turned in an effective, rigorously deglamorized performance, but the film was dismissed as exploitative in many quarters (“An incredible collapse of taste, judgment, decency, prose, insight, journalism and movie technique,” Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times), and failed to reignite Mr. Curtis’s fading career. He divorced Ms. Kaufmann and married a 23-year-old model, Leslie Allen, that same year.
After two unsuccessful efforts to establish himself in series television, “The Persuaders” (1971-72) and “McCoy” (1975-76), Mr. Curtis found himself in a seemingly endless series of guest appearances on television (he had a recurring role on “Vegas” from 1978 to 1981) and supporting performances in ever more unfortunate movies, including Mae West’s excruciating 1978 comeback attempt, “Sextette.” A stay at the Betty Ford Center followed his 1982 divorce from Ms. Allen, but Mr. Curtis never lost his work ethic. He continued to appear regularly in low-budget movies (he played a movie mogul in the spoof “Lobster Man From Mars,” 1989) and occasionally in independent films of quality ( Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 “Insignificance,” opposite Theresa Russell as a Monroe-like actress). He took up painting, selling his boldly signed Matisse-influenced canvases through galleries and department stores.
After divorcing Ms. Allen, Mr. Curtis was married to the actress Andrea Savio (1984-92) and, briefly, to the lawyer Lisa Deutsch (1993-94). He married his sixth wife, the horse trainer Jill VandenBerg, in 1998, and with her operated Shiloh Horse Rescue, a nonprofit refuge for abused and neglected horses, in Sandy Valley, Nev.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Curtis is survived by Kelly Lee Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, his two daughters with Janet Leigh; Alexandra Curtis and Allegra Curtis, his two daughters with Christine Kaufmann; and a son, Benjamin Curtis, with Leslie Allen. A second son with Ms. Allen, Nicholas Curtis, died in 1994 of a drug overdose.
He published “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography,” written with Barry Paris, in 1994 and a second autobiography, “American Prince: A Memoir,” written with Peter Golenbock, in 2008. In 2002 he toured in a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” in which he played the role of the love-addled millionaire originated by Joe E. Brown in the film. This time, the curtain line was his: “Nobody’s perfect.” His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.
Tony Curtis, star of 'Some Like It Hot' and 'Sweet Smell of Success,' dies at 85
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 30, 2010; 6:38 AM
Tony Curtis, an actor who rose to movie stardom in the 1950s by blending street attitude with near-pretty looks, gave compelling dramatic performances in "Sweet Smell of Success" and "The Defiant Ones" and became a comic icon as a cross-dressing Jazz Age musician in "Some Like It Hot," died of cardiac arrest Wednesday at his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.
Mr. Curtis was a veteran of more than 100 films of wildly varying quality. But his charismatic leading roles in "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) and "Some Like It Hot" (1959) -- often ranked, respectively, among the finest dramas and comedies ever made -- assured him high regard among generations of moviewatchers and scholars.
After a hardscrabble childhood, Mr. Curtis realized his looks could be an escape to a better life, and his sex appeal launched his career in the late 1940s. But within a few years, the protective studio system that had nurtured him as a teenage heartthrob collapsed.
"The significant thing is that he did not disappear," said film historian Jeanine D. Basinger. "He made the transition because he actually had more than just a pretty face. He understood the situation he was in very clearly. He was a very intelligent boy from the streets. He was street smart, and he got business-smart."
Mr. Curtis sustained a career for more than five decades and surprised reviewers with his deft handling of a wide range of characters.
When he first came to Hollywood, Mr. Curtis was among the young beefcake performers, including Rock Hudson, hired by Universal-International Pictures after World War II. Mr. Curtis was cast in fantasy and action films such as "Son of Ali Baba" (1952) and "The Black Shield of Falworth" (1954).
His greasy, ducktail hairdo, electric blue eyes and an athletic build won him a following, particularly among young fans. Yet, those early swashbuckling roles also prompted a lingering joke -- that he made awful dialogue worse with his Bronx accent. "Yonda lies da castle of my foddah," he was said to have spoken one typical line.
In 1951, Mr. Curtis attracted a lot of press attention by marrying a co-star, Janet Leigh, the first of his six wives. Leigh, best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), and Mr. Curtis became one of the world's most glamorous couples. One of their daughters, Jamie Lee Curtis, also became an actress.
Mr. Curtis's image was reproduced in magazines, and his clothing was torn at by enthusiastic female fans whenever he made public appearances. An official in the studio's fashion department made him a special suit designed to give easily whenever an admirer pulled at its buttons.
By the mid-1950s, with the studio system ending because of deregulation, Mr. Curtis embraced the changing business climate and began an active freelancing career. It was at this time that his ambition for better film roles became clear.
His first movie part of widely acknowledged distinction was "Trapeze" (1956), which allowed him to combine his athleticism with emotional depth. He played the protege of circus acrobat Burt Lancaster, who is also his rival for the attentions of Gina Lollobrigida.
"The surprise is the depth and force of Tony Curtis," reviewer Alton Cook wrote in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. "The snarling frenzy with which he meets misfortune is both pathetic and ruthless."
Lancaster, who produced the movie, hired him again for "Sweet Smell of Success," which bombed with the public but was later regarded as an acid masterpiece. Mr. Curtis was Sidney Falco, a publicist who sheds all dignity to ingratiate himself with a powerful columnist modeled on Walter Winchell and played by Lancaster.
In 1959, Mr. Curtis received his only Academy Award nomination, in Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" (1958), a powerfully provocative film at the time. He portrayed a Southern bigot who escapes from prison chained to a black convict (played by Sidney Poitier). Poitier always credited Mr. Curtis for insisting that the black actor get his first star billing.
Mr. Curtis gave a chilling performance as convicted rapist and serial killer Albert DeSalvo in the documentary-style "The Boston Strangler" (1968). Mr. Curtis considered this his most demanding part -- he put on 30 pounds, wore heavy boots that slowed his walk and used other prosthetics to give him the creepy gaze of a murderer.
He was deeply upset when he was overlooked for an Oscar nomination. He said he was not respected among many of his peers, calling himself a "stepson in my profession."
Earlier, he had expressed anger after being denied an Oscar nomination for Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot." He and Jack Lemmon (who was Oscar-nominated for his part), played 1920s jazz musicians who disguise themselves as women in an all-girl band after witnessing a mob slaying.
Mr. Curtis had a triple role: a womanizing jazz saxophonist named Joe, who rechristens himself "Josephine" in the female orchestra and also pretends to be a sexually unresponsive oil heir in order to entice a golddigging singer (played by Marilyn Monroe).
Mr. Curtis rendered the millionaire as an affectionate parody of Cary Grant, whom he had idolized since childhood. He received some of the best reviews of his career. Movie critic David Thomson called Mr. Curtis "the subtlest thing in that outrageous film" and "more cunningly feminine than Lemmon."
Film historian Robert Osborne said Mr. Curtis's performance in "Some Like It Hot" was "so wonderful and such a surprise" and the movie is held in such high regard that it overcomes a later downward spiral of his career.
Over the years, Mr. Curtis had some isolated moments of distinction. He played a wheeler-dealer in the Blake Edwards comedy "Operation Petticoat" (1959) with Grant and in "Captain Newman, M.D." (1963) with Gregory Peck. He also was memorable as American Indian war hero Ira Hayes in "The Outsider" (1961) and the nubile "singer of songs" in "Spartacus" (1960), appearing in the sexually tinged bathtub scene with Laurence Olivier.
However, reviewers considered Mr. Curtis greatly out of place as Yul Brynner's Cossack son in "Taras Bulba" (1962), set in 16th-century Ukraine. He further squandered much of the 1960s in comedies like "Boeing-Boeing" with Jerry Lewis, "Not With My Wife, You Don't!" and "Arrivederci, Baby!" (also known as "Drop Dead, Darling").
In the 1970s, he turned to television and film projects such as "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan" (1978) and "The Manitou" (1978), a thriller about which he later wrote, "some 400-year-old evil spirit decides to reincarnate itself on Susan Strasberg's neck."
He also had a minor role in Mae West's final movie, "Sextette" (1978), and played "Col. Iago" in "Othello, el comando negro" (1982), a film very loosely based on the Shakespeare play.
Mr. Curtis attributed his long career slump to alcohol and cocaine addictions spurred by alimony payments to his ex-wives and anger toward his peers, whom he felt never accepted him as an actor.
In 1980, his erratic behavior led to his firing during stage tryouts of Neil Simon's "I Ought to Be in Pictures." A stay at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., reportedly helped him wean off drugs in the mid-1980s. In 1994, his son Nicholas, from his third marriage, died of a heroin overdose.
Mr. Curtis attributed his own recovery to the energy that he put into drawing and painting. He continued acting and remained an earthy presence on the talk-show circuit.
He openly discussed his bedroom prowess and once moved into the Playboy Mansion. "The only leading lady I didn't have an affair with was Jack Lemmon," he once joked.
Mr. Curtis, the son of Jewish-Hungarian immigrants, was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, in Manhattan. He was the oldest of three sons, one of whom was fatally struck by a truck. His other brother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
"My mother abused me a lot, slapped me around," Mr. Curtis once said. He added that his father, a tailor, "was a depressed man, always sewing."
An undistinguished student, he left high school in 1943 and served in a noncombat Navy role on Guam during World War II.
He said he knew as a teenager that his looks could help him escape an otherwise bleak life. He joined a theater group at a local YMCA at 15, and on the G.I. Bill after the war, he enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop run by Erwin Piscator in New York.
His classmates included Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte and Bea Arthur, but Mr. Curtis had the most immediate good fortune. Within months, a Universal-International talent scout, struck by Mr. Curtis's appearance, signed him to a seven-year contract.
Universal was not among the most prestigious of studios, but it did have one advantage. "You could be good-looking but not much else and could get a job immediately," film historian Osborne said. "It was really perfect for Curtis."
Bernard Schwartz changed his name to Tony Curtis because of a Hungarian ancestor with the last name Kertesz. He was put through dramatic and physical training and became a skilled fencer. He also made a point of approaching starlets with the line, "I've been assigned by Universal to teach you how to kiss."
At first, Mr. Curtis appeared in small roles, such as a gigolo who dances "Brazilian Rhapsody" with Yvonne De Carlo in "Criss Cross" (1948).
He began to attract female fan letters, and Universal gave him his first starring role, in 1951, with "The Prince Who Was a Thief" opposite Piper Laurie. The film was immensely profitable and confirmed to studio executives Mr. Curtis's sexual appeal.
He went to race cars in "Johnny Dark" (1954), boxed in "Flesh and Fury" (1952) and showed his comic potential in Douglas Sirk's underrated "No Room for the Groom" (1952). He also was in a musical, "So This Is Paris" (1955), and played the title role in the movie biography "Houdini" (1953), about the escape artist Harry Houdini, with Janet Leigh as his screen wife.
Mr. Curtis was continually at the top of popularity polls, but he became increasingly unsparing in his comments about Hollywood. To a reporter who asked what it was like making love to Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like It Hot," he said, in a much-repeated line, that it was "like kissing Hitler."
He later said the comment was meant flippantly and partly in frustration to Monroe's inconsiderate behavior on the set, but it came to symbolize Mr. Curtis's unpredictability. His 1970 arrest at London's Heathrow Airport for marijuana possession, while making the British television series "The Persuaders!" with Roger Moore, was seen as further evidence of why his bankability plummeted.
Mr. Curtis began a long career in secondary roles -- among them, the impotent star in "The Last Tycoon" (1976), a Joe McCarthy-like senator in Nicolas Roeg's 1985 film "Insignificance" and gangster Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV film "Mafia Princess."
Doubleday published his Hollywood-based novel, "Kid Andrew Cody and Julie Sparrow" in 1977 but sued him over what the company considered an unacceptably bad second work of fiction. After losing an appeal, Mr. Curtis was ordered to repay the $50,000 advance.
Despite such setbacks, he was always accessible to the media and bared most of the strains and pleasures of his life in a 1993 memoir written with Barry Paris. His marriages to Janet Leigh, Christine Kaufmann, Leslie Allen, Andrea Savio and Lisa Deutsch ended in divorce.
Mr. Curtis told the London Independent in 1996: "Movies have given me the privilege to be an aristocrat, to be the prince. It gets me great tables at restaurants, beautiful cars to drive around in, a lovely woman to take out to dinner, to sit around and talk with some of the most intelligent brains that are around, to be recognized everywhere, to be loved by so many people, to lie here in bed, turn on the television, and there I am."
9/30/2010
latimes.com
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, ABC 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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MovieWes
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What?!?!?! No mention of "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan"!?!?! Classic. :p
Seriously, though, R.I.P. He was a great actor.
Seriously, though, R.I.P. He was a great actor.
"Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution." -- Alec Guinness (Lawrence of Arabia)
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Sonic Youth
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I told my mother today about it and she was very saddened. She always had a soft spot for Tony Curtis since he looked just like her favorite cousin whom she grew up with. The resemblance was indeed striking. She said her girlfriends at her agricultural boarding school just swooned over his picture. Unfortunately, that cousin, who was a teacher and later a much admired head principal, while always maintaining his charm and charisma, became rather fat over the years and died, more than 30 years ago, at 45 of a heart attack. So I guess my mother, in a small, rather bizarre way, felt he kind of died again today.
R.I.P. Bernard Schwartz. The Amirs will always have a place for you in their hearts.
R.I.P. Bernard Schwartz. The Amirs will always have a place for you in their hearts.
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By the time I started seeing Tony Curtis on screen, he was stuck in that sleazeball seducer/hustler persona, whether in comedies like Operation Petticoat or Sex and the Single Girl, or dramas like Captain Newman MD. I didn't much care for him.
But, clearly, in the era of Sweet Smell of Success/The Defiant Ones/Some Like It Hot (the first and third of which are all-time favorites) , he must have for a brief moment seemed like a prime American actor. Whatever the rest of his life brought, those few films make him unignorable.
But, clearly, in the era of Sweet Smell of Success/The Defiant Ones/Some Like It Hot (the first and third of which are all-time favorites) , he must have for a brief moment seemed like a prime American actor. Whatever the rest of his life brought, those few films make him unignorable.
He may have been reactionary when it came to Brokeback Mountain -- which was surprising in that he otherwise had very progressive politics, and amusing given the hi-jinks between him and Laurence Olivier in Spartacus -- but that can't erase the fact that he was an extremely talented and criminally under-rated actor. He was at the center of at least three great films -- Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat, Alexander Mackenrick's Sweet Smell of Success and Douglas Sirk's No Room For The Groom -- and also had many other memorable movies to his credit, including The Perfect Furlough, The Rat Race, Some Like It Hot, Captain Newman, M.D., The Great Race and Mister Corey. I always found it an outrage that he wasn't nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his glorious, gently self-mocking performance in The Last Tycoon while those two clowns from Rocky were.
Edited By Damien on 1285862516
Edited By Damien on 1285862516
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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I found his comments in regards to Brokeback Mountain amusing given that he looked like an aging drag queen in his later years.OscarGuy wrote:I know it's awful, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was that now we have one less conservative asshole who would vote against another Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars.
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I know it's awful, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was that now we have one less conservative asshole who would vote against another Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars.
Wesley Lovell
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"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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From The Guardian
Tony Curtis, one of the last great stars of Hollywood's golden age, died yesterday aged 85. The death was confirmed by a representative of his actor daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, although further details have yet to emerge. Curtis's health had been failing for a number of years and he went to hospital in July after suffering an asthma attack.
Appearing on stage at the Guardian BFI Southbank interview in 2008, Curtis was asked by an audience member what he would like to have written on his gravestone. "Nobody's perfect," he quipped, quoting the final line of his best-loved comedy, Some Like it Hot.
He was born humble Bernard Schwartz, to Hungarian immigrant parents in the Bronx and grew up dreaming of stardom and idolising the casual, easy grace of Cary Grant. Marketed as prime 1950s beefcake by Hollywood, he brought a pulchritudinous dash to a rash of substandard studio pictures before winning plaudits for his role as a venal press agent in the 1957 drama The Sweet Smell of Success. The following year he gained his only Oscar nomination for his turn opposite Sidney Poitier in the tense racial parable The Defiant Ones.
His other notable films include The Vikings, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and The Boston Strangler. Curtis always insisted that the latter film, in which he played serial killer Albert DeSalvo was the finest performance of his career. In later years he turned to painting, with some success, and cited Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte as his main inspirations.
His most enduring screen role, however, remains his role as a runaway jazz musician, alongside Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic Some Like it Hot. The film even provided Curtis with the chance to channel the spirit of his old idol Cary Grant - mimicking the actor's distinctive transatlantic twang to impersonate a stuffy oil millionaire. "Nobody talks like that!" retorted the disgusted Jack Lemmon.
Curtis married six times and appeared to revel in his reputation as a carouser. "I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman young enough to be my wife," he once remarked.
Frank Sinatra once remarked that Curtis was his favourite Hollywood actor, "because he beat the odds". In old age, the actor looked back delightedly on a career that had carried him from the impoverished neighbourhoods of New York to a high-life as a Hollywood superstar. "I've made 122 movies and I daresay there's a picture of mine showing somewhere in the world every day of the week," he said proudly.
Tony Curtis, one of the last great stars of Hollywood's golden age, died yesterday aged 85. The death was confirmed by a representative of his actor daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, although further details have yet to emerge. Curtis's health had been failing for a number of years and he went to hospital in July after suffering an asthma attack.
Appearing on stage at the Guardian BFI Southbank interview in 2008, Curtis was asked by an audience member what he would like to have written on his gravestone. "Nobody's perfect," he quipped, quoting the final line of his best-loved comedy, Some Like it Hot.
He was born humble Bernard Schwartz, to Hungarian immigrant parents in the Bronx and grew up dreaming of stardom and idolising the casual, easy grace of Cary Grant. Marketed as prime 1950s beefcake by Hollywood, he brought a pulchritudinous dash to a rash of substandard studio pictures before winning plaudits for his role as a venal press agent in the 1957 drama The Sweet Smell of Success. The following year he gained his only Oscar nomination for his turn opposite Sidney Poitier in the tense racial parable The Defiant Ones.
His other notable films include The Vikings, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and The Boston Strangler. Curtis always insisted that the latter film, in which he played serial killer Albert DeSalvo was the finest performance of his career. In later years he turned to painting, with some success, and cited Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte as his main inspirations.
His most enduring screen role, however, remains his role as a runaway jazz musician, alongside Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic Some Like it Hot. The film even provided Curtis with the chance to channel the spirit of his old idol Cary Grant - mimicking the actor's distinctive transatlantic twang to impersonate a stuffy oil millionaire. "Nobody talks like that!" retorted the disgusted Jack Lemmon.
Curtis married six times and appeared to revel in his reputation as a carouser. "I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman young enough to be my wife," he once remarked.
Frank Sinatra once remarked that Curtis was his favourite Hollywood actor, "because he beat the odds". In old age, the actor looked back delightedly on a career that had carried him from the impoverished neighbourhoods of New York to a high-life as a Hollywood superstar. "I've made 122 movies and I daresay there's a picture of mine showing somewhere in the world every day of the week," he said proudly.