Tony Curtis:
“I was 22 when I arrived in Hollywood in 1948. I had more action than Mount Vesuvius – men, women, animals! I loved it too. I participated where I wanted to and didn’t where I didn’t. I’ve always been open about it.“
It is in my Top Ten Favorite Films, and I am not alone. Some Like It Hot (1959) was a box-office smash and it received widespread acclaim from critics and is considered among the Best Films of all Time by most film historians. Directed, produced and co-written by Billy Wilder, it stars Marilyn Monroe, Curtis and Jack Lemmon. The screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond is based on the French film Fanfare D’amour (1935). If implausibly you have never seen it, Some Like It Hot is about two male musicians who disguise themselves as women to escape from gangsters after they witness them committing murder, inspired by the real-life Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.
The film received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Lemmon, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and winning for Best Costume Design. It won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Comedy.
The film was released without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) because it features LGBTQ-related themes, including cross-dressing. The Hays Code was this self-imposed industry set of guidelines for all movies. It prohibited profanity, even the suggestion nudity, graphic or realistic violence, gay sex, perversions, and rape. The code was already starting to weaken in the early 1950s, mostly because of greater social tolerance for certain topics (if you know what I mean), but it was still enforcing censorship to movies until the mid-1960s. The overwhelming success of Some Like It Hot is probably one of the main reasons behind the demise of the Hays Code.
In the terrifically funny, awkward yacht scene in Some Like It Hot, Curtis as Joe/Josephine is being psychoanalyzed, and he tells Monroe: “I spent six months in Vienna with Professor Freud, flat on my back” just before lying flat on his back. He continues with:
“I’ve got this thing about girls. They just sort of leave me cold … Mother Nature throws someone a dirty curve, and something goes wrong inside.”
There were whispers about Curtis’s sexuality from the moment he hit Hollywood in 1948, changing his name from Bernard Schwartz to “Anthony Curtis”. His career lasted six decades, appearing in more than 100 films, in wide range of roles in many film genres.
His first major work is in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957) with Burt Lancaster. He was nominated for his first Academy Award for The Defiant Ones (1958) opposite Sidney Poitier (with who he shares a birthday today). Curtis took a supporting role in the epic, historical, very queer drama Spartacus (1960), where he gets naked with Laurence Olivier in a bathhouse.
It was rather brave for a leading man to agree to scene in which he admits to being gay, even if it is a way of tricking Monroe into making him straight.
Curtis was born to Hungarian-Jewish parents; he grew up in the Bronx during the desperate depths of the Depression. When he was eight years old, his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and he was sent away to an orphanage. His younger brother was also schizophrenic. Another brother was killed when he was hit by a car. He joined a street gang and was frequently in trouble with the law. Curtis joined the U.S. Navy when he was 17 years old, influenced by Cary Grant‘s performance in the submarine flick Destination Tokyo (1943). He served aboard a submarine tender until the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, Curtis was witness to the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay from his ship’s signal bridge about a mile away.
After serving in the war, he worked as a truck driver. Talent agent Joyce Selznick caught his work at an acting workshop at the New School and a career was born.
Curtis married six times, enjoyed lots of wine and cocaine (he went to the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s), and he partied with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Yet, Curtis had a reputation for being bisexual. Who knows? Many actors of the era were: Hudson, Lancaster, Grant, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift. What is striking to me is how Curtis does not really try to hide it in a time when male stars were able to lie to about sex and sexuality for the paycheck.
Curtis’s final credits rolled in 2010, taken by a heart attack. He left behind five children and seven grandchildren. He had been a longtime cigarette smoker, although he quit smoking in 1980. Yet, during the 1960s Curtis served as the president of something called the “American I Quit Smoking Club” that produced anti-smoking ads. He was married to fellow actor Janet Leigh from 1951 to 1962. His daughter, Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Lee Curtis, wrote after his death:
“My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world. He will be greatly missed.”
Five months before his death he rewrote his will, disinheriting all his children, and leaving his entire estate to his sixth and final wife who was 45 years younger than Curtis. His granddaughter daughter Ruby Guest came out as transgender in 2021.
Curtis said he loved his gay fans and has had many close friendships with gay figures in Hollywood, especially director Vincente Minnelli. In Some Like It Hot, he even does the best Cary Grant impression ever. Plus, there is the hilarious scene where Lemmon in drag happily clacks his maracas and announces that he’s just become engaged to Joe E. Brown’s smitten suitor. Curtis as Joe incredulously asks,”But why would a guy wanna marry a guy?”. And after a perfectly delicious pause, Lemmon answers: “Security!”.
There was a musical adaptation of Some Like It Hot based on the screenplay. It opened in 1972 on Broadway starring Tony Roberts in the Curtis role, and Robert Morse in the Lemmon spot. It has lyrics by Bob Merrill, and music by Jule Styne. Curtis, then in his late 70s, was in a 2002 revival, this time playing Osgood Fielding III, the character originally played by Joe E. Brown.
Gay songwriter duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman have a new musical version currently playing on Broadway simply titled Some Like It Hot just to make it easy for fans. It has been nominated for 12 Tony Awards and features non-binary actor J. Harrison Ghee as Jerry (the Lemmon role).
Surprisingly versatile as an actor, easily moving between comedy and drama, Tony Curtis was #BornThisDay in 1925. Here are 10 of my favorite of performances of his in films:
