Tony Curtis: The world star would have now become 100

He was one of Hollywood’s big ones. Maybe even the biggest because nobody was as open as he was. When asked about the causes of his fame, Tony Curtis (1925-2010) replied: “Do you know what the problem with people like me? We quickly have very great success without thinking. Is that due to the talent or are we just damn happiness?”

With luck, the weighs in life. Tony Curtis was also unlucky in many phases, wrote about him: “His fame beamed brighter than that of his colleagues, his life was wild and his crashes were deeper.”

On June 3, Tony Curtis would have been 100 years old. Unfortunately he died 15 years ago. You remember wistfully, because someone like Tony Curtis is apparently missing today in the Star ensemble of Hollywood.

“A good -looking boy who seemed to be light -footed and Flamboyant embodied the shine that is part of the magic of cinema. In his eyes you could easily lose yourself. His charm and charism had a good effect beyond the celluloid”, “,

Nevertheless, the official Hollywood thanked him only with a star on the Walk of Fame: he never got an Oscar. And at the Golden Globe, only the long -painted Henrietta Award was awarded to him as the “most popular actor” (1958, 1961).

The fact that he ended up in Hollywood was one of the great luck of his life. Before that, he was clearly on the dark side. He was born in New York City in 1925 as Bernard Schwartz, his parents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary and so bitterly arm that they brought little Bernie and his brother Julius to the orphanage at times because there was not enough to eat at home. Until his schooling, the boy did not speak English, but only Hungarian and Yiddish.

The streets of the Bronx were the first stage for little Bernard, apparently he inherited the father’s talent, a tailor with acting ambitions. He performed spontaneous shows for neighboring children. In it he processed his own story: the need of the family, the mother’s schizophrenia, the death of his older brother, who had been run over by a truck, and the mental illness of the younger brother, which was later to end as a beggar. The anti -Semitic hostility of everyday life also flowed into his performances. After completing the high school, Bernard only wanted one thing: out here! He was just 16 years old.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he contacted the US Navy in 1941 and served until the end of the war in 1945. After his release, he was able to study free of charge at the City College of New York through the GI Bill veteran program, then at the New School in Greenwich Village Schauspiel. He really wanted to be an actor, he knew that since his first appearance in the school theater.

In New York, the legendary German stage director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who lived in the New York exile, taught him in his dramatic workshop. There he discovered a Talentagin from Hollywood, he moved to the west coast.

At times he lived in Los Angeles with Marlon Brando (1924-2004) in a shared apartment, but he liked the obsessed method-acting collibia of the Strasberg school. He came from the Piscator School and saw himself as an instinctive actor of classic imprint.

And he looked damn well – like the young Brando – only he had his dramatic beauty, but an adorable mischief that was particularly well received by women. That was also due to his idiosyncratic hairstyle. At the end of the 1940s, almost all American men wore a military brush haircut, but the young Schwartz had the head curls grow longer. He later remembered: “My hairstyle made me a hero for practically every white teenager in America.” Even Elvis Presley (1935-1977) copied the cut.

The young man who had come to the west coast because of the money and the many beautiful women signed a standard contract with Universal Pictures at 23. He changed his name in Anthony Curtis (Anthony based on the novel “Anthony Adverse”, Curtis after the girl’s name Kurtz of his mother).

In the studios, he met his colleagues Rock Hudson (1925-1985) and Piper Laurie (1932-2023), when he felt the competition and a traumatic fear of failing and returning to the poverty of the Bronx. He later wrote: “I had a chance of one million, was the one who would be the least successful. I wasn’t the last one on the dead bar, I was tied to a sack under the dead bar, in a sewer.”

In 1949 he had his debut with a tiny appearance as a rumber dancer in the crime drama “Daring Alibi” (with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo). He had to dance with Yvonne de Carlo and started a Techtelmechtel with her. Later he wrote in his autobiography “American Prince: A Memoir”: “She was naked with me in a bed on the Mulholland Drive with a view of LA that was like a main prize in the lottery.”

In the next film “The Brood of Satan” he already had a small speech role. Until 1951 he participated in eight other films, then he got his first leading role in “The Thieves of Marschan”. It became a box office hit, Tony Curtis had established himself. He not only played with the stars, he was now one himself. One of the last big stars of the old Hollywood. And he played with the greatest actors of his time, including Kirk Douglas (1916-2020) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960). In 1959, he was nominated for the Oscar as the best leading actor for his role in “Escape in Chains” on the side of Sidney Poitier (1927-2022). He doesn’t get it.

He had one of his paradise in Billy Wilders (1906-2002) famous crime comedy “Some like it hot”. His congenial partners: Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) and Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), with which Tony Curtis naturally immediately had an affair about which he reported in his memoirs. But he went away empty -handed at the Oscars.

Tony Curtis was now increasingly committed to light comedies, and he worked as on the assembly line: from 1949 to 1965 he worked in 54 out of a total of 140 films, but he also felt that it would not go on. Hollywood had also changed. In 1967, the magazine “Variety” published a list of “the best paid actors who have not been worth their money in recent years” in 1st place: Tony Curtis. The new Hollywood has “new stars like Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman”. They “correspond to the new type of intellectual outsider and shape a new urban realism. Time for Tony Curtis seems over.” (“The time”)

In 1968 he again achieved a big hit with “The Women’s Murderer of Boston”, one of his best films, but there was nothing with the Oscar. Then, two years later, he became a novelty, because until then no actor in his category had been necessary to take on a leading role on television. Tony Curtis became the best paid television star in the world alongside Roger Moore (1927-2017). Especially in Germany, the format 1970-71 was cult by the stupel synchronization of Rainer Brandt (1936-2024).

From the 1980s, Curtis managed “his own legend, in talk shows, interviews, books” (“Tagesspiegel”). In the media, more about his six marriages, including Hollywood star Janet Leigh (1927-2004) and the German actress Christine Kaufmann (1945-2017). He had six children of his women, son Nicholas died in 1994 at the age of 23.

Above all, his two daughters and actresses Jamie Lee Curtis (66, “He was not a father and he was also not interested in being one”) and Allegra Curtis (58) drew a dark picture of Tony Curtis as a father. Allegra spoke of a man who was sunk in depression, self -pity and addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Tony Curtis, who even made it into the Museum of Modern Art in New York in his second career as a painter with his “Time Boxes”, died on September 29, 2010 at the age of 85 at his lung disease COPD, which he had suffered as a chain smoker.

A short time after his death, he caused a media hit one last time: In his will, he disinhered his children, the assets of over $ 60 million went to his sixth wife, the 45-year riding instructor Jill Vandenberg (54).