Hot property

TONY CURTIS was a man of many parts and almost as many names. He was born Bernard Schwartz, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, in New York’s Bronx in 1925, but when Hollywood studio Universal put him under contract they told him to change his name.

He chose Antonio Cortez, only to be told that was still “too Latin”. So Cortez became Curtiz, and eventually Curtis. A star was born. Yesterday he died, aged 85, at his Las Vegas home.

He was one of the last of the matinee idols from Hollywood’s golden era when looks were everything, and his trademark black quiff and dark good looks earned him plenty of fan mail.

As one of many contract actors at Universal, he was put in tights in a series of historical movies, including The Prince Who Was A Thief, memorable for Curtis saying in his thick Bronx accent: “Yonda lies da cas’l of my fadda da caliph”.

After treading water, cinematically speaking, in the late Forties and Fifties in a variety of adventure films, he teamed up with Burt Lancaster for the circus movie Trapeze – another pair of tights – and inadvertently triggered his acceptance as a serious actor rather than pin-up boy.

That led to them teaming up in the drama Sweet Smell Of Success, in which he wore a suit as Sidney Falco, the sleazy sidekick of Lancaster’s gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker.

A year later, in 1968, he won an Oscar nomination – his only one – for his performance opposite Sidney Poitier as two convicts on the run. “It was a token nomination – a Jew and a black guy,” he later said.

Ironically, for someone who’d been employed initially for his male good looks more than his talent, the role for which Curtis is remembered most fondly sees him wearing a dress. The film, of course, is Billy Wilder’s classic comedy Some Like It Hot. He plays a man, a woman and impersonates Cary Grant as one of two musicians – Jack Lemmon is the other – who hide out in a girl band to escape gangsters.

Their leading lady was Marilyn Monroe, whose timekeeping and attitude were alienating fellow workers. Curtis already knew her, having dated her on his arrival in Hollywood in the mid-Forties when she was 19 and a redhead.

His love life was legendary. His first wife was Psycho actress Janet Leigh and one of his children, Jamie Leigh Curtis, became a Hollywood star herself.

He married six times in all, dying peacefully in bed at his home in Nevada with his current wife Jill, more than 40 years his junior and whom he married in 1998, at his side.

The kid from the New York ghetto who didn’t learn to speak English until he was seven was a delinquent who stole and played truant.

Acting, Curtis once said, put him on the straight and narrow.

Two personal events did much to shape his thinking – the death of his brother Julius in a traffic accident as a boy and being put in an orphanage temporarily when his impoverished parents decided that would be better for him.

His father encouraged him to attend a summer camp for troublemaking boys and it was there he took up acting. The story goes he liked it so much that he volunteered to put on a wig and dress to play Guinevere in a show – a taste of his star turn in Some Like It Hot.

He enlisted in the navy and, once discharged, found it could help further his acting career because the GI Bill meant he could go to acting school without paying. Stage work and bit parts followed before his Universal contract put him on the road to screen stardom.

He became a genuine movie star who lived and loved the life of a leading man. And in true movie star fashion, found that a successful life on screen wasn’t necessarily reflected in his private life.

He suffered from hypochondria, he went into therapy and developed a fear of flying. He became dependent on drugs and alcohol. His first marriage ran into trouble.

Then his career stalled, thanks to a series of so-so romantic comedies that failed to match either the comedic heights of Some Like It Hot or dramatic depths of Sweet Smell Of Success.

IT took The Boston Strangler to remind people that he was more than a pretty face. He was hardly an obvious choice to play the serial killer, resorting to taking an unrecognisable mug shot to convince the director he was right for the part.

Television also came to the rescue. He starred with Roger Moore in the TV series The Persuaders as American playboy Danny Wilde, solving crimes in exotic locations around the world with an attractive girl on his arm.

Off-camera he was still having problems with drink and drugs, once giving interviews while lying on the floor of his hotel room.

In the mid-Eighties he returned to the screen, playing a corrupt senator in Insignificance, but his movie roles since then have been sporadic. He made occasional screen appearances, but devoted more and more time to painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art has one of his surrealist works in its permanent collection.

His on-screen appearances were reserved for TV chat shows and promoting his autobiography, American Prince: A Memoir.

He decided early on that he didn’t want to be known merely as an actor. “I wanted to feel like a star,” he explained.

“I wanted to get my footprints in Hollywood on the sidewalk, which I got. I wanted to be on the cover of all the magazines and go to parties in a limousine with a beautiful girl. I did all of that – and more.”