Montgomery Clift

Edward Montgomery Clift was born on October 17, 1920, in Omaha, Nebraska, to William Brooks Clift, vice-president of Omaha National Trust Company, and Ethel Fogg "Sunny" Clift. He had a twin sister, Roberta, and an older brother, William Brooks Clift, Jr. His parents, both Quakers, had met as students at Cornell University and married in 1914. Clift's mother maintained that her biological great-grandfathers were U.S. postmaster-general Montgomery Blair and Union commander Robert Anderson, a lineage disclosed to her by the family doctor who delivered her, and she devoted much of her life to seeking recognition from those alleged relations.

Sunny Clift was determined to raise her children in an aristocratic manner. As long as his father could afford it, Clift and his siblings were privately tutored, traveled extensively across America and Europe, and became fluent in German and French. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression forced his father to downsize and relocate to Chicago, while Sunny continued traveling with the children. It was during this period of financial contraction, when the family moved from Chicago to Sarasota, Florida, that Clift, then thirteen, pursued his first acting role — a small, non-paying part in a local production. The family subsequently settled in New York City, where his stage career began in earnest.

Clift made his Broadway debut at age fourteen, playing Harmer Masters in the comedy Fly Away Home, which ran from January to July 1935 at the 48th Street Theatre. The New York World-Telegram noted his "amazing poise and dexterity," and producer Theo Bamberger credited him with a "natural histrionic instinct." He spent a brief period at the Dalton School in Manhattan but found traditional schooling difficult, and continued to develop primarily through his stage work. Over the course of his Broadway career, which spanned 1935 to 1945, he appeared in productions featuring works by Moss Hart and Cole Porter, Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder, and worked alongside performers including Dame May Whitty, Alla Nazimova, Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne.

Among his notable Broadway credits was Yr. Obedient Husband and Eye on the Sparrow. He originated the role of Henry in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. At age twenty, he appeared in Robert Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night, which won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also appeared in the drama The Searching Wind. In 1939, as a cast member of the Broadway production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever, Clift took part in one of the earliest television broadcasts in the United States, aired by NBC's New York station W2XBS during the 1939 New York World's Fair. He also worked in radio during this period, including a May 1944 broadcast of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! for The Theatre Guild on the Air, though one critic noted he disliked the medium. Clift was given 4-F draft status after suffering dysentery in 1942 and did not serve in World War II. In September 1945, in what would be his penultimate Broadway appearance, he starred in the stage adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's You Touched Me; he and actor Kevin McCarthy later wrote a screenplay for a film adaptation that was never produced.

Clift transitioned to film in the mid-1940s. His first Hollywood role was opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawks's Red River, filmed in 1946 and released in August 1948, where it earned two Academy Award nominations. His second film, The Search, directed by Fred Zinnemann, earned Clift his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor; his naturalistic performance prompted the question from observers, "Where did you find a soldier who can act so well?" Clift was dissatisfied with the script and reworked it himself, though the Academy Award for screenwriting went to the credited writers. He went on to receive Academy Award nominations for his work in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953), and Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), accumulating four nominations in total. He also appeared in John Huston's The Misfits (1961).

Clift's approach to acting placed him alongside Marlon Brando and James Dean as one of the figures associated with method acting in Hollywood, though Clift himself distanced himself from that label. He was among the first actors invited to study at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. His decision to withhold signing a studio contract until his first two films had proven successful was credited with creating, in the words of later analysis, "a power differential that would go on to structure the star–studio relationship for the next 40 years." Biographer Robert LaGuardia described Clift's stage technique as relying on inner silence, unusual pauses, awkward body movements, and erratic shifts in mood — methods LaGuardia characterized as "extremely unorthodox, risky procedures" that drew audiences into an unusually direct engagement with the performer. Montgomery Clift died on July 23, 1966.