The Full Biography
Tony Curtis. Actor. The Bronx kid born Bernard Schwartz who made a pretty face do comedy, chains, and a press agent’s slime, then spent the last decades with a brush in his hand.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in a blond wig and a dress, sharing a train berth with Jack Lemmon and a band, while Marilyn Monroe — Sugar Kane — fills the frame the way a searchlight fills a lot. The year was 1959. The picture was Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. What the still cannot show is Bernard Schwartz of the Bronx, a Hungarian Jewish house, a Navy deck from which he watched the Japanese surrender, and an old man in Henderson, Nevada, who painted more than he acted and died in 2010 still answering to a name a studio had issued.
He was born on June 3, 1925, in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, the son of Emanuel (Mano) Schwartz and Helen Klein, immigrants from Hungary. The house was poor and loud. A younger brother, Julius, was killed by a truck. Another brother, Robert, was born with disabilities Helen could not always manage. Bernard learned, early, what a handsome face could buy in a hard borough and what it could not. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1943, served in the Pacific aboard the submarine tender USS Proteus, and was in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 when the surrender was signed. He has said he watched it from the deck. He came home, used the G.I. Bill, and studied with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School. The instrument was already a face. The training was to give the face something to do.
Universal signed him in 1948 and issued the name. Tony Curtis — the Tony from a favorite novel, the Curtis from a relative — was a studio construction, and he knew it. Early pictures used the looks: swashbucklers, Westerns, a young man in a tight shirt. The Prince Who Was a Thief. Son of Ali Baba. Hedy Lamarr opposite him in Houdini (1953). The teen magazines were a climate. The serious parts were not yet. He married Janet Leigh in 1951. Their daughters, Kelly and Jamie Lee, would become actresses. The marriage photographed as a studio dream and ended in 1962, as studio dreams do, after the dream had already done its work.
The door into the file that lasts is the late 1950s. Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), as Sidney Falco, a press agent who will do anything J. J. Hunsecker requires. Burt Lancaster is the columnist. The picture is black-and-white venom. Curtis, who had been hired for a profile, played hunger. It is the performance people who distrust the matinee still have to respect. Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), chained to Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He did not win. He had, at last, a nomination the pretty-boy file could not absorb.
Then Wilder. Some Like It Hot (1959): Joe, a saxophone player who becomes Josephine and, when it suits him, a fake Shell Oil junior named Junior. Lemmon is Jerry/Daphne. Monroe is Sugar. George Raft and Pat O’Brien fill the gangster joke. Curtis did a Cary Grant voice for Junior that is itself a small essay on what he had wanted to be. The picture is routinely named among the best comedies ever made. It is also a document of a matinee idol who could do farce without winking the farce to death. He had wanted to be taken seriously. Wilder took him seriously as a clown. Both things are true.
It’s like kissing Hitler.Tony Curtis, on kissing Marilyn Monroe during Some Like It Hot — a crack the columns never let die
Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), as Antoninus — a part that includes a bath-house conversation the studio and the censors fought over, and that he played as a man who knows he is owned. Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958) with Kirk Douglas, a physical picture, a lost eye in the fiction, a brotherhood the posters sold. Blake Edwards’s Operation Petticoat (1959) put him in a pink submarine with Cary Grant himself — the voice he had borrowed for Junior, now in the same frame, a lesson in timing he did not waste. The Great Impostor. Taras Bulba. Forty Pounds of Trouble. The Boston Strangler (1968), a colder part, Albert DeSalvo as a man the camera has to sit with. He had wanted, always, the dramatic file. Kramer and Mackendrick had given it to him. Hollywood kept offering the profile. He took what kept the household in clothes.
In the 1970s the features thinned and television took the hours. The Persuaders! (1971–72), with Roger Moore, is a British object Americans underfile: two rich men, a comic chemistry, a series that made Curtis a face in rooms that had not grown up on Universal swashbucklers. He did The Flintstone Kids as a voice. He did Vega$ as a guest. He did The Users and pictures that paid. He kept working. He did not always keep choosing. The 1970s and 1980s are a long middle of the kind of credits a handsome man accepts when the first climate has moved. The Mirror Crack’d (1980) put him back in a grown-up ensemble with Elizabeth Taylor and Angela Lansbury. It is not Falco. It is a professional showing up.
He married often. Christine Kaufmann, the German actress, after Leigh; then Leslie Allen; then Andrea Savio; then Lisa Deutsch; then, in 1998, Jill Vandenberg, who was with him at the end. Six marriages. Children including Allegra and Benjamin as well as Kelly and Jamie Lee. The private life was a tabloid weather he did not always survive with dignity. He drank. He used cocaine. He went to the Betty Ford Center in 1984. He said so. The recovery is part of the last third, not a redemption montage. He painted — serious hours, not celebrity daubs — and exhibited. The canvases are bright, pop, sometimes nudes, sometimes a man working out what a second instrument is for. He published a novel and a memoir. He took small parts, including a role in Some Like It Hot’s long shadow, and let Jamie Lee become the scream the family name now also carries.
The turn is Sweet Smell and Wilder in the same two-year window: a pretty man proving he could be vicious and proving he could be funny, after which the industry kept hiring the face and only sometimes the proof. He spent the rest of his life living with that split. The last decades, in Nevada, are the split resolved in favor of the brush and the wife who stayed.
Six things most people never knew
- Bernard Schwartz watched the Japanese surrender from a Navy deck. USS Proteus, Tokyo Bay, September 1945. The matinee sits on a war the stills skip.
- A brother killed by a truck is the first Bronx fact. Julius. Another brother, Robert, who needed care. The handsome son was not the only child in the file.
- Sweet Smell of Success is the dramatic monument. Falco. Lancaster. A nomination did not come for that one. It should have been enough.
- The Grant voice in Some Like It Hot is an audition he had been giving since the Bronx. Junior is a wish with a timing.
- Betty Ford, 1984, is in the file on purpose. He said the cocaine and the drink. He did not sand it for the memoirs.
- The last career was paint. Henderson. Exhibitions. A second instrument that did not require a wig or a chain.
Jamie Lee Curtis has been, in public, both protective and exact about the father — the charm, the absences, the pride in Halloween and in the work he did when the work was good. Kelly is in the same ledger. Jill Vandenberg Curtis kept the Nevada house and the painting schedule. Friends from the Universal years describe a kid who knew how he photographed. Friends from the last years describe a man who was happier in a studio of his own than on someone else’s mark. Both are the life.
He had, by then, already outlived the studio that named him. Universal’s contract system was a memory. The teen magazines were a memory. What remained was a man who could still walk into a festival hall and make Josephine’s voice for a clip, and who would rather have been asked about Falco. He took the clip. He also took the brush. The split that began in 1957 — serious actor, pretty face — was never healed by an Oscar. It was healed, as much as those splits are, by a desert morning and a canvas that did not care how he photographed in 1953.
The later years
The later years were Nevada, a sixth marriage, and a painter’s clock. He had already done the recovery and the memoir. He lived in Henderson with Jill, kept a studio, and sold pictures to people who wanted a Curtis that was not a still from 1959. He took the occasional role — a voice, a cameo, a television movie — without pretending the climate could be rebuilt. He appeared at festivals that wanted Josephine and Falco and the chained convict, and he signed. He also, when a journalist would let him, talked about the Bronx and the Navy and the brother the truck took, because those were the rooms the wig could not reach.
Honors arrived as they do for men who have outlived their first posters. A star on the Walk of Fame had been in the sidewalk since 1960. France made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He published American Prince, a memoir that is frank about the marriages and the powder. He painted every day he could. Visitors describe a man who had been a climate and was now a neighbor with a famous jawline and a smock. On September 29, 2010, he died at home in Henderson of cardiac arrest. He was eighty-five. Jill was there. The daughters were the public grief. The canvases stayed on the walls.
What those Nevada years actually held was a decision to stop auditioning for the face. He had spent the 1950s proving the face could act and the 1970s proving he would work without the proof. The last act is a man who had found an instrument that did not require a director’s permission. He was not a Sunday painter in the dismissive sense. He was a professional who had changed trades and kept the hours. The industry that had named him Tony used the obituaries to run Some Like It Hot again. That is fair. The house in Henderson was full of color that had nothing to do with Monroe’s dress. That is also fair. A complete life holds the berth on the train and the studio in the desert.
He had already, before the last day, seen Jamie Lee become a kind of star he had not been — horror, comedy, a late Oscar of her own still to come in 2023. He did not live to watch that statue. He lived long enough to know the Schwartz line had another climate in it. For a man who had been issued a name, that knowledge is a kind of rest.
The painting is the chapter the fan magazines did not know how to run. He worked large canvases, bright acrylics, a pop line that owed something to the movie posters and something to a man who had spent decades being looked at and wanted, at last, to do the looking. Galleries in New York and Las Vegas took the work seriously enough to hang it. He signed the pictures Tony Curtis, because that was the name that would bring a buyer through the door, and he did not pretend the buyer had come for an unknown. Honesty about the brand is a kind of craft. He had learned it in the Bronx and at Universal. He used it in the desert.
After he was gone
The pictures remain the public estate. Some Like It Hot still teaches timing. Sweet Smell of Success still teaches what a hungry man sounds like. The Defiant Ones still plays in rooms that argue about the 1950s. Jamie Lee has kept the name kind in public and complicated in interviews, which is the correct daughter math. Jill has kept the paintings in circulation. The Bronx has a historical plaque instinct it has not always spent on him. The Navy file is in the archive.
He came out of a Hungarian kitchen, watched a surrender, took a studio name, played a press agent and a woman and a man in chains, married too often, got clean, painted, and died in a desert house at eighty-five. If you only remember the wig, you have the still. If you remember Falco, the Proteus, Betty Ford, and the smock, you have him.
Portrait: United Pictures Corporation · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons