Appearing on stage at the Guardian BFI Southbank interview in 2008, Curtis was asked by an audience member what he would like to have written on his gravestone. "Nobody's perfect," he quipped, quoting the final line of his best-loved comedy, Some Like it Hot.
He was born humble Bernard Schwartz, to Hungarian immigrant parents in the Bronx and grew up dreaming of stardom and idolising the casual, easy grace of Cary Grant. Marketed as prime 1950s beefcake by Hollywood, he brought a pulchritudinous dash to a rash of substandard studio pictures before winning plaudits for his role as a venal press agent in the 1957 drama The Sweet Smell of Success. The following year he gained his only Oscar nomination for his turn opposite Sidney Poitier in the tense racial parable The Defiant Ones.
His other notable films include The Vikings, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and The Boston Strangler. Curtis always insisted that the latter film, in which he played serial killer Albert DeSalvo was the finest performance of his career. In later years he turned to painting, with some success, and cited Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte as his main inspirations.
His most enduring screen role, however, remains his role as a runaway jazz musician, alongside Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic Some Like it Hot. The film even provided Curtis with the chance to channel the spirit of his old idol Cary Grant - mimicking the actor's distinctive transatlantic twang to impersonate a stuffy oil millionaire. "Nobody talks like that!" retorted the disgusted Jack Lemmon.
The role was a gamble for Curtis, who spends the bulk of the film in drag, but it paid off brilliantly. "I was very nervous about getting dressed up as a girl," he would later confess. "Jack [Lemmon] had no problem with it .... We realised it was the perfect symmetry for the two of us. Let him be the flaunty one, let me be the more quiet one, which fit out characters perfectly."
Curtis married six times and appeared to revel in his reputation as a carouser. "I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife," he once remarked.
Frank Sinatra once claimed that Curtis was his favourite Hollywood actor, "because he beat the odds". In old age, the actor looked back delightedly on a career that had carried him from the impoverished neighbourhoods of New York to a high-life as a Hollywood superstar. "I've made 122 movies and I daresay there's a picture of mine showing somewhere in the world every day of the week," he stated proudly, providing an epitaph all of his own.
via: guardian
