Actor Tony Curtis died Wednesday night at his Nevada home from cardiac arrest after long battling chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Curtis, who dressed in women’s clothing for “Some Like It Hot” (see video below) was hospitalized in July because he was having difficulty breathing.
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“I’m not ready to settle down like an elderly Jewish gentleman, sitting on a bench and leaning on a cane,” he said at 60. “I’ve got a helluva lot of living to do.”
Curtis–husband of Janet Leigh and father of Jamie Lee Curtis– started out as a heartthrob actor but proved himself a big-time serious actor in 1957, taking on “Sweet Smell of Success.”
The Oscar and Academy Award nominated actor struggled with drug and alcohol abuse later in life but then made a comeback as a character actor.
“From 22 to about 37, I was lucky,” Curtis told Interview magazine in the 1980s, “but by the middle ’60s, I wasn’t getting the kind of parts I wanted, and it kind of soured me. … But I had to go through the drug inundation before I was able to come to grips with it and realize that it had nothing to do with me, that people weren’t picking on me.”
And he didn’t retire after that either. He began painting canvasses that sold for up to $20,000.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” he said in 1990 as he concluded a painting in 40 minutes in the garden of the Bel-Air Hotel. “Painting has given me such a great pleasure in life, helped me to recover.”
Curtis and his daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, were estranged for a long time but later reconciled.
“I understand him better now,” Jamie Lee Curtis had said, “perhaps not as a father but as a man.”
Curtis had six children altogether and was previously married to Leslie Allen, Lisa Deutsch and Jill VandenBerg.
Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, the son of Hungarian Jews who had emigrated to the United States after World War I. His father, Manny Schwartz, had yearned to be an actor, but work was hard to find with his heavy accent. He settled for tailoring jobs, moving the family repeatedly as he sought work.
“I was always the new kid on the block, so I got beat up by the other kids,” Curtis recalled in 1959. “I had to figure a way to avoid getting my nose broken. So I became the crazy new kid on the block.”
His sidewalk histrionics helped avoid beatings and led to acting in plays at a settlement house. He also grew to love movies.
“My whole culture as a boy was movies,” he said. “For 11 cents, you could sit in the front row of a theater for 10 hours, which I did constantly.”
After serving in the Pacific during World War II and being wounded at Guam, he returned to New York and studied acting under the G.I. Bill. He appeared in summer stock theater and on the Borscht Circuit in the Catskills. Then an agent lined up an audition with a Universal-International talent scout. In 1948, at 23, he signed a seven-year contract with the studio, starting at $100 a week.
Bernie Schwartz sounded too Jewish for a movie actor, so the studio gave him a new name: Anthony Curtis, taken from his favorite novel, “Anthony Adverse,” and the Anglicized name of a favorite uncle. After his eighth film, he became Tony Curtis.
He also turned to writing, producing a 1977 novel, “Kid Cody and Julie Sparrow.” In 1993, he wrote “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography.”
With AP