Background
Curtis, Tony was born on June 3, 1925 in Bronx. Son of Manuel and Helen (Klein) Schwartz.
Curtis, Tony was born on June 3, 1925 in Bronx. Son of Manuel and Helen (Klein) Schwartz.
Studied drama at New School Social Research.
Curtis was for years one of the test cases cited to illustrate the follies of the cinema. After the Navy and various drama schools, he made his debut in Siodmak’s Criss Cross (48) and was soon signed up by Universal slave market of young talent.
Two came through: Rock Hudson and Curtis. One benefit of the system was that it enabled Curtis to make a lot of movies in a short time—mostly enjoyable hokum: City Across the River (49, Maxwell Shane); Enrights Kansas Raiders (50); a bit part as a cavalryman in Anthony Mann’s Winchester 73 (50); and then a succession of leads in quickie adventure spectaculars—a rapid historical wind-up for Bernie Schwartz: Sierra (50, Alfred E. Green); Rudolph Maté’s The Prince Who Was a Thief (51); a first clear success in George Mar¬shall’s Houdini (53), costarring with his wife. Janet Leigh; Son of Ali Baba (53, Kurt Neumann); The All-American (53, Jesse Hibbs); Forbidden (53) and The Black Shield of Falworth (54), both for Maté; Beachhead (54, Stuart Heisler); The Puiyle Mask (55, Bruce Humberstone); Six Bridges to Cross (55, Joseph Pevney); The Square Jungle (56. Jerry Hopper); and The Rawhide Years (56, Maté).
Perhaps it was a test of endurance, but Curtis wore tights and uniforms honorably and never took himself as solemnly as some of his scolds chose to. In 1956, he began earnestly to improve himself with Carol Reed’s Trapeze, a film that carefully blended the athletic and the sentimental. But he came into his own when readmitted to a modern urban world, and in Mister Cory (57, Blake Edwards) and as Sidney Falco in Mackendricks Sweet Smell of Success (57) he was aide to show some of the things a Bronx Ali Baba had learned about life. In the latter, he gave one ol the first portrayals of unprincipled American ambition and of the collapsible personality that goes with it. He was man on all fours some years before America really noticed the posture. The script has many cutting things to say about Falco that are like ciga-rettes put out in Tony’s “ice-cream face." In response, Curtis was hurt, brave, and bitter—a terrific performance.
Curtis did not escape flabby costume films: The Vikings (58, Richard Fleischer); Spartacus (60, Stanley Kubrick); and Taras Bulba (62, J. Fee Thompson). But he next adventured into comedy, thrust there first by Billv Wilder in Some Like It Hot (59). He is the subtlest thing in that outrageous film: more cunningly feminine than Lemmon and throwing in a superb impersonation of Cary Grant as a bonus. Blake Edwards immediately cast him with Grant in Operation Petticoat (59) and Curtis was now a comic Falco, still convincing but several shades rosier. After Who Was That Lady? (60) for George Sidney, he gave one of his best performances as the chronically flexi¬ble Great Imposter (60, Robert Mulligan), an underrated film that owes a lot to Curtis’s fallible grasp of himself. He was now cast in the comedian’s mold in |ewison's Forty Pounds of Trouble (62); Quines Paris When It Sizzles (64); and Sex and the Single Girl (64); Minnelli’s Goodbye Charlie (64); and Edwards' The Great Race (65) before the zest began to trickle away. The comedies became more contrived and further from Curtis' territory: Boeing Boeing (65. John Rich); Drop Dead, Darling (66, Ken Hughes); Mack- endrick’s wretched Don’t Make Waves (67); The Chastity Belt (68, Pasquale Festa Campanile) in Italy; and Monte Carlo or Bust (69, Ken Annakin), God knows where. Working his way through marriages and psychiatrists, Curtis toppled into the gravity that had always lain in wait: it led him to make The Boston Strangler (68, Fleischer), which he no doubt thought was a significant movie.
He worked in England on a TV series. The Persuaders, and was disappointing as Lepke (74, Menahem Golan); a rogue in The Count of Monte-Cristo (74, David Greene); an insecure actor in The Last Tycoon (76, Elia Kazan); a stooge in The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (78, John Berry); The Manitou (78, William Girdler); Sextette (78, Ken Hughes); Casanova and Company (78, François Legrand); It Rained All Night the Day I Left (79, Nicolas Gessner); Little Miss Marker (80, Walter Bernstein); as David O. Selznick in Moviola: The Scarlett O’Hara War (80, John Erman); The Mirror Crack'd (80, Guy Hamilton); Inmates (81, Guv Green); The Million Dollar Face (81, Michael
O’Herlihy); Portrait of a Showgirl (82, Steven Hilliard Stern); Brainwaves (82, Ulli Lomel); as foe McCarthy in Insignificance (85. Nicolas Roeg); Mafia Princess (86, Robert Collins); Der Passagier (88, Thomas Brasch); Tarzan in Manhattan (89, Michael Schultz); Lobster Man from Mars (89, Stanley Sheff), as a movie executive looking to make a tax-loss picture—some ol these are movies such as Sidney Falco might seek out, clinging to the dark, waiting for the heat to pass.
There are more films, strictly from hunger, as Sidney would say: Midnight (89, Norman Thaddens Vane); Prime Target (91, David Heavener and Phillip J. Roth); Center of the Web (92, David A. Prior); The Mummy Lives (93, Gern O’Hara); Naked in New York (94, Daniel Algrant); The Immortals (95, Brian Grant); Hardball (97, George Erschbamer); Louis Frank (98, Alexandre Rockwell); Stargames (98, Greydon Clarke).
Married Janet Leigh, June 4, 1951 (divorced 1963). Children: Kelly, Jamie Lee. Married Christine Kaufmann, February 8, 1963 (divorced 1967).
Children: Alexandra, Allegra. Married Leslie Allen, April 20, 1968 (divorced 1982). Children: Nicholas (deceased 1994), Benjamin.
Married Andrea Savio, 1984 (divorced 1992). Married Lisa Deutsch, February 28, 1993 (divorced 1994). Married Jill Vandenberg, November 6, 1998.