Category: Deaths

Hollywood legend Tony Curtis has died. The NY Times is reporting the 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).

WHAT’S MY LINE

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.

SOME LIKE IT HOT

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.

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.

Source: NY Times