The Full Biography
Montgomery Clift. Actor. The Omaha stage man who taught the camera a new interior, then kept working after the face changed.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a close-up opposite Elizabeth Taylor, two young faces in a romance the plot has already doomed. The year is 1951. The picture is A Place in the Sun. What the still cannot show is Edward Montgomery Clift of Omaha, a decade of Broadway before the first film, a man who would not sign the seven-year contract the studios used as a leash, a night in May 1956 that altered the face the still had sold, and a death in New York on July 23, 1966, at forty-five, that the town still tells as if the crash were the whole biography.
He was born on October 17, 1920, in Omaha, Nebraska, to William Brooks Clift, a banker and broker, and Ethel “Sunny” Fogg Clift. There was a twin sister, Roberta, and an older brother. The household moved. Sunny wanted culture the way other mothers wanted a lawn. The children were tutored, taken through Europe, parked in New York. The first pressure was a gifted boy in a family that treated gift as a plan. He was on Broadway by the mid-1930s: Fly Away Home in 1935, then a run of serious plays that made him a New York actor before Hollywood had a still. He worked with the Lunts. He learned, on a stage, how little a face has to do if the thought is real. He was already, in his twenties, choosing parts as if a career were a diet and not a buffet.
The door was 1948, and it was two pictures at once. Howard Hawks put him opposite John Wayne in Red River, a cattle-drive epic in which the young man refuses the old man’s law. The same year Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, shot in the ruins of postwar Europe, gave him a G.I. who helps a lost boy and earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He had not come west as a discovery. He had come as a stage actor who would work on film if the part was the part. He refused the standard long studio term. Seven years, for him, was a sentence other people could serve. Olivia de Havilland had already taken that fight to court. Clift simply declined to enter the building on those terms.
William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) put him opposite de Havilland as the suitor who may be love or a theft. George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), from Dreiser, made him George Eastman: poor, beautiful, and trapped between Shelley Winters and Taylor. The close-ups are still taught. He was nominated again. Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) used the interior as a priest’s silence. Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953) made him Private Prewitt, the bugler who will not box, and brought a third nomination. He did not win. He would be nominated four times and never take the statue home. The town called him, with Brando, the new face. James Dean watched him the way a younger brother watches the brother who left first. The Method label is too neat. What he brought was a privacy the camera had not been allowed to rent.
On the night of May 12, 1956, while Raintree County was still shooting, he left a dinner at Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Beverly Hills. The car went off the road. Friends reached him. Taylor was among them. He lived. The face that had been the still was rebuilt. Pain entered the file and did not leave. Drink and pills followed the pain the way they follow it in any town that needs a man on a mark at dawn. This is a chapter, not a tour. He finished Raintree County. He went back to work. The second face is in The Young Lions (1958), in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), in Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960). He did not become a memorial. He became an actor with a different instrument.
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a wreck the culture can visit. The turn is that he kept working after the still had been declared over. A lot of handsome careers end when the photograph changes. He treated the second face as the job. Before the crash the file was already dense. William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) put him opposite Olivia de Havilland as the suitor who may be love or a theft. The Big Lift (1950) sent him back to a ruined Berlin. George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), from Dreiser, made him George Eastman: poor, beautiful, and trapped between Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor. The close-ups are still taught. Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) used the interior as a priest’s silence. Vittorio De Sica’s Terminal Station (1953), also released as Indiscretion of an American Wife, put him in a Roman railway hall with Jennifer Jones. Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953) made him Private Prewitt, the bugler who will not box, and brought a third nomination. He did not win. He would be nominated four times and never take the statue home.
Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957) is the picture he was making when the car went off the road. He finished it with the second face. The Young Lions (1958) put him opposite Marlon Brando and a young Maximilian Schell. Lonelyhearts (1958), from Nathanael West, is a small, sour room he took seriously. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) put him with Taylor again, and with Katharine Hepburn, in a Tennessee Williams heat. Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960) sent him to the Tennessee Valley as a government man who cannot stay clean of the people he has been sent to move. The Misfits (1961), for John Huston, put him with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in a Nevada that looks like the end of a certain Hollywood. Gable died shortly after. Monroe had little time left. Clift, in the picture, is already a man who knows what a body costs. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) gave him a few minutes as a sterilized victim on a witness stand and a fourth Oscar nomination. Huston’s Freud (1962) was a hard shoot between two stubborn men, the instrument in pain, the director unwilling to yield. Then the work thinned. His last picture, The Defector (1966), shot in West Germany from February to April, is a man finishing the job because the job was what he had.
The Method label is too neat. What he brought, from the Lunts’ stage to Hawks’s cattle drive to Zinnemann’s ruins, was a privacy the camera had not been allowed to rent. He chose picture by picture. Seven years, for him, was a sentence other people could serve. Four nominations sat on a shelf without a statue. Dean watched him. Brando arrived in the same weather. Taylor stayed. The crash is a chapter. The pictures after the crash are the correction. Omaha is the birthplace. Broadway is the first shop. East 61st is the last door. The still of 1951 is not the whole file.
Six things most people never knew
- Omaha is the birthplace; Broadway is the first shop. 1920. A decade on the New York stage before Red River. The film actor is a stage actor who said yes to a camera.
- He would not sign the seven-year studio term. The leash other leading men wore. He chose picture by picture. The freedom cost him the machine’s protection.
- 1948 is two breakthroughs, not one. Red River and The Search. Wayne in one. A lost child in the other. The nomination came from Europe’s ruins.
- Four Academy Award nominations. No win. The Search. A Place in the Sun. From Here to Eternity. Judgment at Nuremberg. The statue is not the file.
- May 12, 1956, is a chapter he survived. He finished the picture he was making. The second face is in The Misfits and at Nuremberg. The wreck is not the biography.
- He was gay in a town that required a closet. The file can say so without a tour. Taylor called him family. He never made a marriage for the columns.
He did not marry. The household that mattered was work, a small circle, and Taylor, who treated him as a brother she had chosen and who stayed in the story after the stills had moved on. Friends from the Broadway years describe a meticulous man, kind to a partner, hard on a false line, already tired of being looked at before the crash gave the looking a darker hobby. The Clift who lived on East 61st Street at the end was a body the pain had used hard. Both the private craftsman of 1948 and the exhausted man of 1966 are the life.
The later years
There were almost no late years in the ordinary sense. The decade after the crash is the second act that should have been a long third. Home was New York: first a duplex at 209 East 61st Street, then, after a fire, the townhouse at 217 East 61st, a few doors down, with a teak bar cart and awnings the neighbors complained about. He worked when he could stand the day. Freud had already shown how hard a set could become when the instrument was in pain. Drink and pills followed the pain the way they follow it in any town that needs a man on a mark at dawn. This is a chapter, not a tour. Between pictures the calendar emptied. Hollywood had not built a third act for a face it no longer knew how to sell. He did not become a memorial. He became an actor waiting on the next part that would have him.
The Defector, a Cold War picture directed by Raoul Lévy, sent him to West Germany in the first months of 1966 as James Bower, an American scientist asked to bring a man and a microfilm out of the East. It is a last job, not a farewell tour. He came home to 61st Street. Lorenzo James, his nurse and companion, kept the house. On July 22, 1966, he spent the day mostly silent. That night James asked if he wanted to watch a rebroadcast of The Misfits. He said no. On the morning of July 23, James found him dead in bed of a heart attack. He was forty-five. Taylor’s grief was public because the friendship had been real. The columns reached for a sermon about beauty and ruin. The sermons are cheaper than The Search, cheaper than Prewitt, cheaper than the witness at Nuremberg.
The New York years after Freud were not a farewell tour. They were a man in pain on a quiet street, choosing parts as if a career were still a diet. Friends from the Broadway years still came. Taylor still came. Jack Larson and a small circle kept the evenings from becoming only the columns. He did not make a marriage for the papers. He did not give the town a confession it could sell. He read. He waited. When Lévy offered The Defector, he took the plane to Germany because the work was what he had. He came home and opened a book. That is not a legend. That is a last night. The townhouse at 217 East 61st Street is still a New York fact. His mother sold it after the funeral with a plaque that said he had lived there. The plaque is not the file. Prewitt is the file. The witness at Nuremberg is the file. The second face is the file.
He had not been given an elder’s run of honorary chairs. He had been given a short film career of unusual density, and he used it. The second face is in The Young Lions, in Suddenly, Last Summer, in Wild River, in The Misfits, at Nuremberg, in Freud, in a German spy picture nobody treats as a monument. That is the last chapter: a New York address, a companion in the next room, a man who kept taking the work until the body stopped. Omaha is the birthplace. Broadway is the first shop. East 61st is the last door.
After he was gone
The pictures remained. Every American actor who lets the camera sit on a thought still pays him a tax. Brando still arrives in the same sentence, correctly, as a contemporary weather. Dean is the younger aftershock. Taylor’s name stays in the file as family, not as gossip. Four nominations sit on a shelf without a statue. The crash is the climate. The work after the crash is the correction.
He came out of Omaha, learned the stage, refused the seven-year leash, made Wayne look at a new kind of son, made Taylor a partner in a doomed close-up, played a bugler who would not box, survived a night that changed the still, kept working, and died in New York at forty-five with the town already writing the wreck instead of the parts. If you only remember the face before May 1956, you have the still. If you remember Broadway, the refused contract, and the pictures he finished after the face changed, you have him.
Portrait: Studio publicity (unknown photographer) · Public domain (studio publicity still) · via Wikimedia Commons