Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, in East Harlem, Manhattan, was an American actor whose career spanned six decades. He died on September 29, 2010. Originally from New York, New York, Curtis appeared on Broadway in 2002, with credits that include Some Like It Hot.

Curtis was born at the Fifth Avenue Hospital on the corner of East 105th Street, the eldest of three sons of Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father had been born in Ópályi, near Mátészalka, and his mother came from Nagymihály, now Michalovce, Slovakia, though she later stated she had arrived in the United States from Vaľkovo, Slovakia. Hungarian was Curtis's only language until age six, which delayed his schooling. His father worked as a tailor, and the family lived in the back of the shop. His mother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, as was his youngest brother Robert, who was institutionalized with the same condition.

At age eight, Curtis and his brother Julius spent a month in an orphanage after their parents could not afford to feed them. Julius was later struck and killed by a truck. Curtis joined a neighborhood gang involved in truancy and minor theft. At eleven, a neighbor intervened by sending him to a Boy Scout camp. He attended Seward Park High School but did not graduate until after his return from military service, having previously struggled with basic literacy and arithmetic. At sixteen, he took his first small acting part in a school stage play.

Curtis enlisted in the United States Navy, inspired by Cary Grant's role in Destination Tokyo and Tyrone Power's in Crash Dive. He served in the Pacific submarine force aboard the USS Proteus, a submarine tender, until the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, he witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay from his ship's signal bridge, approximately a mile away. After his discharge, Curtis attended City College of New York on the G.I. Bill and subsequently studied acting at The New School in Greenwich Village under German stage director Erwin Piscator. His contemporaries there included Elaine Stritch, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Beatrice Arthur, and Rod Steiger. While still in college, he was discovered by Joyce Selznick, a talent agent, casting director, and niece of film producer David O. Selznick.

Curtis arrived in Hollywood in 1948 at age twenty-three. According to his autobiography, he met Jack Warner by chance on the flight to California. Signing with Universal Pictures, he changed his name from Bernard Schwartz to Anthony Curtis — the first name drawn from the novel Anthony Adverse and "Curtis" from Kurtz, a surname in his mother's family. At Universal, he encountered then-unknown actors including Rock Hudson, James Best, Julie Adams, and Piper Laurie. His uncredited screen debut came in the 1949 crime drama Criss Cross, in which he played a rumba dancer opposite Yvonne de Carlo, with Burt Lancaster as the male lead. His second film, City Across the River, also released in 1949, credited him as "Anthony Curtis." He appeared in several additional films that year, including The Lady Gambles and Johnny Stool Pigeon, and continued building his filmography through 1950 and 1951 with titles including Francis, Woman in Hiding, I Was a Shoplifter, Sierra, Winchester '73, and Kansas Raiders, the last of which billed him as "Tony Curtis."

Universal gave Curtis the starring role in The Prince Who Was a Thief in 1951, a swashbuckler set in the Middle East co-starring Piper Laurie, which became a box office hit and established him as a star. He followed it with Flesh and Fury, No Room for the Groom, and Son of Ali Baba, all in 1952. In 1953, he starred alongside his then-wife Janet Leigh in Houdini, playing the title role. Curtis and Leigh formed their own independent production company, Curtleigh Productions, in early 1955. His profile rose further when he was cast alongside Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze in 1956, one of the year's biggest box office successes.

Lancaster recruited Curtis again for Sweet Smell of Success in 1957, in which Curtis played scheming press agent Sidney Falco. Though the film underperformed at the box office, Curtis received his first widely acclaimed reviews. The following year he co-starred with Kirk Douglas and Janet Leigh in The Vikings, a major commercial hit, and then appeared alongside Frank Sinatra and Natalie Wood in Kings Go Forth. In 1958, Curtis starred in The Defiant Ones as a bigoted white escaped convict chained to a Black man played by Sidney Poitier, earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 31st Academy Awards. In 1959, he appeared in two comedies, Some Like It Hot and Operation Petticoat. The following year he took a supporting role in the epic historical drama Spartacus alongside Kirk Douglas.

After 1960, Curtis's film career declined considerably. He took on the role of Ukrainian Cossack Andrei in the historical action film Taras Bulba in 1962, and in 1968 starred in the true-life drama The Boston Strangler. He also starred in the ITC television series The Persuaders!, playing American millionaire Danny Wilde across twenty-four episodes. In his later years, Curtis made numerous television appearances and, in 2002, brought his presence to Broadway with credits that include Some Like It Hot. Over the course of his career, Curtis acted in more than one hundred films across a wide range of genres.

Curtis married six times and fathered six children. With his first wife, actress Janet Leigh, he had two daughters, Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis. His second wife, actress Christine Kaufmann, was the mother of two of his children, including actress Allegra Curtis. His third wife, Leslie Allen, bore him two sons, one of whom predeceased him. From 1998 until his death, Curtis was married to Jill Vandenberg, a horse trainer.