Remembering Tony Curtis: The Best of Everything

Sidney Falco, Broadway publicist, is telling his secretary Sam how far he wants his ambitions to take him: “Way up high, Sam, where it’s always balmy. Where no one snaps his fingers and says, ‘Hey, Shrimp, rack the balls!’ Or, ‘Hey, mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.’ I don’t want tips from the kitty. I’m in the big game with the big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell, and I didn’t dream it in a dream, either. Dog Eat Dog. In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me.”

An actor doesn’t often get a role that upends his Hollywood image and reveals his inner demons. Tony Curtis, who died Wednesday at 85 of cardiac arrest at his home near Las Vegas, found that dream-nightmare part in the 1957 Sweet Smell of Success. Sidney Falco, a name that replaced Sammy Glick as the slick nogoodnik par excellence, is a pretty boy on the make — all hustle, no morals, and with a line of patter like petty larceny. Then, two years later, he was cast as a stud saxophone player, with Jack Lemmon as his partner and Marilyn Monroe as the bait, in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Twice he got the best of everything: two all-time classics, two defining roles. He sold those characters like a salesman with nonstop charm and his foot in your door, on your neck, up your butt. Some would call it chutzpah; we think it was acting.

(See Tony Curtis’ career in photos.)

As Eddie Fisher was to the pop music of the early 1950s, Curtis was to that period’s movies: a handsome Jewish prince for American girls to fall in love with. Like Fisher with Debbie Reynolds (and later Elizabeth Taylor), Curtis also found a gentile princess: in 1951 he married actress Janet Leigh, she of the sensible freshness and intoxicating allure. (They had two actress daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly, and divorced in 1962.) But Curtis also possessed a Sidney Falconian drive, drive, drive, an acute sense of his attributes and the brains and balls to use them. He had long idolized Cary Grant — who didn’t? — and for his Some Like It Hot character, who wants to convince Monroe he’s a rich yachtsman, Curtis spoke in a broad parody of Grant’s voice. The actor’s reward? In his next film, Operation Petticoat, his costar was Cary Grant.

(See TIME’s 2010 appreciation piece on Eddie Fisher.)

Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, could easily have been defeated by the poverty and misery of his youth. As he relates in the 1994 Tony Curtis: The Autobiography (written with Barry Paris), his tailor father Emmanuel and abusive, schizophrenic mother Helen were so poor that, in 1933, they placed two of their three sons, Bernie and his brother Julius, in a state institution. Five years later, Julius died after being hit by a truck; the third child, Robert, also suffered from schizophrenia. Bernie escaped his tough neighborhood, where fights were common and Jews frequent victims, for high school in Manhattan, then served in the Navy and was present at the Japanese surrender to the U.S. Postwar acting classes and rep work in the Catskills got Bernie attention. Universal-International Pictures signed him and gave him the screen name Anthony Curtis — later Tony Curtis.

(See a TIME Q&A with Tony Curtis.)

He made his Hollywood debut in the 1949 City Across the River, a softening of novelist Irving Shulman’s gritty The Amboy Dukes, and flitted through a much better crime drama, Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (as “Gigolo” — early type casting). Universal quickly identified Curtis as leading-man material but didn’t quite know what to do with him. He was gorgeous, no doubt, especially in the eyeliner and long lashes he sported on screen, but not easily assimilated into standard roles; he looked like Tony Curtis but came on like Bernie Schwartz.

His urban intensity and dark good looks were deemed inappropriate for Westerns, the dominant genre of the day; he was one of the few ’50s Hollywood actors who didn’t star as a cowboy. Instead the studio cast him in pretty-boy roles in B-minus Arabian adventures like The Prince Who Was a Thief and Son of Ali Baba. Curtis’ performance in the medieval-Britain saber-rattler The Black Shield of Falworth was the occasion for widespread mockery. Who doesn’t remember his Bronxian diction while intoning, “Yondah lies da castle of my foddah”? Who knows that, in fact, he didn’t say it?

Curtis slipped more smoothly into the role of Harry Houdini, the Jewish magician and escape artist, in the 1953 bio-pic Houdini; it was the first of five films in which he costarred with Leigh. (The others: Falworth, The Vikings, The Perfect Furlough and Who Was That Lady?) Still, his career seemed mired in mediocrity. Universal couldn’t find projects that would show off their young star to his best advantage — as the studio did for another of its contract-player hunks, Rock Hudson.

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Burt Lancaster had an idea. Another refugee from the New York streets, and one of the first postwar actors to produce his own movies, Lancaster hired Curtis to play his aerial rival in the 1956 Euro-production Trapeze, then cast him in Sweet Smell as Sidney, the publicist trying to get his clients’ items in the gossip column written by Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker. In the script, by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, Sidney’s status floats between villain and victim — he peddles flesh and secrets, and pins the Commie label on an innocent young musician, before getting climactically framed by J.J. — but Curtis was the victor in the movie. It’s easy to imagine that, that when the actor first read this script, he thought exultantly, “That’s me all over!” A shark in the Broadway aquarium, Sidney looked like a million bucks, all counterfeit. “Look at the way Sidney looked,” Curtis told Lancaster biographer Kate Buford. “So…perfect. Great-looking, lean, silk shirts, tapered trousers. Couldn’t get out of that environment. He’s there forever.”

(See TIME’s top 10 newspaper movies.)

Though the character was supposed to be Mulberry Street Italian, Sidney is pure Garment District ambition and aggression; Curtis’ spitting or purring of Odets’ aphorisms sounds like Damon Runyan translated into Yiddish and back again. His mouth luscious and sneering, Curtis is all bustle and rancor, ever moving, biting his nails, full of unfocused nervous energy. His performance may not have been career-making — the film was a financial flop and received no Oscar nominations — but it was actor-making. It expanded and forever defined what we mean by “Tony Curtis”: the slick shtarker, oily and irresistible.

The mass of moviegoers ignored Sweet Smell, but by the late ’50s they surely recognized Curtis as a star for his starring roles in the war movie Kings Go Forth, with Frank Sinatra, and the Nordic adventure The Vikings, with Leigh and Kirk Douglas. He packaged his aggression smartly as the racist jail-breaker handcuffed to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, for which both actors earned Oscar nominations (Curtis’ only Academy acknowledgment). Then came Some Like It Hot, Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s loose adaptation of the 1951 German comedy Fanfarem der Liebe, and Curtis’s second role of a lifetime.

Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are two Prohibition-era Chicago musicians on the run from gangsters after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Disguised as women — Josephine and Daphne — they join an all-girl band, get friendly with the sexy vocalist Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) and bump into the gangsters again. Monroe was the erotic object of the piece, but Curtis managed to exude a steamy sexuality as a man and a woman. In one early scene, as Joe pours on the high-calorie honey to a suspicious ex-flame, Jerry murmurs, in a voice of schoolgirl adulation, “Isn’t he a bit o’ terrific?” He is, too.

(See TIME’s 2001 appreciation piece on Jack Lemmon.)

Curtis takes on three characters here: Joe, Josephine and the Shell Oil heir, all with issues of sexual conquest and surrender. It was his idea to play the millionaire as a cut-rate Cary Grant — a lovely notion, since Grant’s screen persona was a suave blend of the regally masculine and the flirtatiously effeminate. But Curtis also took to the Josephine side of the role, perfectly registering the hauteur, the pursed mouth and the subtle sashay of a period vamp who knows how to handle men with too many hands. At the end, as Josephine, he walks onstage after Sugar has finished the torch song “I’m Thru With Love” and gives her a long, tender smooch. It’s one of the great movie kisses, boy-girl or girl-girl, and Curtis nicely drops the Lothario persona in what may be Joe’s first-ever honest emotional encounter.

Curtis turned 35 when Some Like It Hot opened, and he must have thought it was the start of a high plateau in his career. In fact, his roles and performances would never again reach the Olympian levels of Sweet Smell and Some Like It Hot. In 1960 he made fetching slave meat for Laurence Olivier’s decadent Crassus in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, but was irrelevant to the main story of Kirk Douglas’ slave revolt. He won praise in a trio of bio-pics: as the Native American war hero Ira Hayes in The Outsider (1961), the conman Fred Demara in The Great Impostor and the killer Albert De Salvo in The Boston Strangler. For the most part he coasted through the decade in medium-good or medium-bad sex comedies (with titles like Paris — When It Sizzles, Goodbye Charlie and Not With My Wife You Don’t) and a couple of overinflated period-car comedies (The Great Race and Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies). The slick threat of his prime days gave way to a perfectly respectable, replaceable actor named Tony Curtis.

(See TIME’s 1999 appreciation piece on Stanley Kubrick.)

After his divorce from Leigh he married five more times and fathered four more children. For a half-century after his glory days, Curtis was still displaying his craft, appearing on TV shows and in minor films. His last role was in the Israeli film David & Fatima, in which he played an old Jew named Mr. Schwartz. A salesman has to keep selling his product — himself — to the end. Once he had the best of everything; finally he just had the habit. Curtis, no less than Sidney Falco, loved the game too much to give it up. “Couldn’t get out of that environment. He’s there forever.”

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Read TIME’s 1959 review of Some Like It Hot.