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Tony Curtis R.I.P.

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    Tony Curtis R.I.P.

    The man who launched a thousand haircuts... and he was bloody good in The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot and Sex And The Single Girl.

    #2
    Tony Curtis R.I.P.

    Damn. That'll teach me to try to think of a funny title...

    Anyway, "Over yonder is the castle of my fadda"...

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      #3
      Tony Curtis R.I.P.

      A pity that phrase will be remembered mostly. When given the chance he could be very, very good indeed. His double act with Burt Lancaster in the peerless Sweet Smell Of Success is superb.

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        #4
        Tony Curtis R.I.P.

        Tony Curtailed.

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          #5
          Tony Curtis R.I.P.

          I've only just learned (like in the last 5 minutes) that he was Hungarian (or at least Hungarian Jewish), and he could only speak Hungarian until he was about 6, despite being born in New York

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            #6
            Tony Curtis R.I.P.

            When we were at college (no, keep reading, this is great), the girls who shared our house made a life-size model of Tony Curtis and sat him on our sofa. Huh! What was that all about?! His face was a close-up photo of Tony Curtis cut out of a Sunday magazine, so it was dead realistic. It used to sit there, staring intensely across the room. At night you'd come in, forget it was there and jump right out of your skin when you turned the lights on.

            God, we were mad. Those days eh.

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              #7
              Tony Curtis R.I.P.

              Man, where to start. When I was my son's age, I actually pronounced Tony Curtis my favourite actor which, in retrospect, is both precocious and telling.

              "Some Like It Hot", "Sweet Smell of Success", "The Vikings", "Trapeze", "Spartacus" and, probably the source of my fondness for him, "The Persuaders"

              He was also an absolutely beautiful looking man, probably pipping Elvis. No problem identifying Jamie Lee Curtis' genes. I saw him on Jonathon Ross last year and he was still great value, a real old fashioned raconteaur.

              IT's a shame, in fact, that the obituaries appear to be ending in the 80s as he was a reasonably successful painter in the last couple of decades and genuinely appeared to have a very happy later life.

              An interesting detail for me was finding out that he was a Hungarian Jew like my father-in-law.

              I also thought there was an opportunity missed to cast him as Ray Liotta's Dad in something

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                #8
                Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                I was surprised to read that The Persuaders only lasted one series. Apparently the Americans didn't take to it.

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                  #9
                  Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                  What? Madness. It does mean that you can get them all in one DVD set though.

                  "The Protectors" was almost exactly identical,wasn't it?

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                    #10
                    Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                    Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote:
                    He appears (well, his voice does) uncredited in Rosemary's Baby. He plays the actor who John Cassavettes' character lost out to for a starring role but who was subsequently struck blind by the cult's curse. You can hear him in the scene where Rosemary phones the actor to ask if he misplaced anything when he met her husband ("How am I doing? Well, let's see. I only broke six glasses today..."). Polanski didn't tell Mia Farrow who's voice it was on the other end of the phone - he wanted her to express genuine confusion over the familiarity of the voice. Farrow's reaction in the scene is genuine.
                    Another classic piece of voice work was, of course, his 'Stony Curtis' in 'The Flinstones' (50 years old today, folks).

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                      #11
                      Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                      From Esquire in 2006:

                      It's not hard to understand America's fascination with Marilyn Monroe. She was the first girl to wear see-through blouses. I met her in '49 at Universal. I was already under contract. She was looking for a contract. I must've been twenty-three or twenty-four. We met at the studio and started to go out. We were together for six or seven months. Steady. Fucked our heads off — you'll excuse the expression. At the time, nobody knew how big she'd become. I never felt her figure was so proper; I thought it was a little lumpy in places. She was a redhead back then, and at the time she seemed no different from all the other young women with nice knockers trying to get into movies. But then she developed that stupid-woman -- no, I don't want to call it that — it was more like a naive, little-girl quality. In movies, she started to talk slowly, as if she was thinking of the words she was going to say, and that became her magic. That and the see-through blouse fit together perfectly.

                      Sex is something you can become good at, like fencing. You can learn how to fence. You can learn how to fuck.

                      When I left the Navy, I used the GI Bill to get into the Dramatic Workshop, which was located at the President Theatre on Forty-eighth Street. Walter Matthau and Harry Belafonte were students there, too. We were all just trying to make it. Later on, I went out to California, and good things started happening for me. When I came back to New York to do a promotion for City Across the River, they gave me a suite at the Sherry-Netherland and a huge black limo. I took it around to show my buddies in the Bronx and then went by the Dramatic Workshop. It was a terrible, rainy afternoon, and who do I see out in front? Walter Matthau. He's got a long, heavy coat on with a Racing Form sticking out of the pocket, and he's looking down at the gutter. Here I am in this nice, warm limo. And there he is, this grumpy guy surrounded by a cold, miserable world. The look on his face says, "What's ever going to happen for me? Nothin'!" So I tell the driver to pull alongside him and stop. Now Walter's watching the limo. I roll the window down, look at him, and say, "I fucked Yvonne De Carlo!" Then I roll the window back up in a hurry and tell the driver to get the hell out of there.

                      No, no, no, he wasn't mad! For years, Walter loved to tell that story at parties. He'd make it last twenty minutes.
                      ...
                      I'm eighty years old. Eighty fucking years old. I don't feel any different now than I did when I was thirty. And here I am, sitting next to you now, with all my faculties. Some areas, I'm not what I used to be. My feet hurt. I don't pee on time. My eyes are going. My hearing's going. So I've gotta take care of those things. But I'm lucky. I have no disease that's going to kill me — not yet. Dying, I just don't feel like it.

                      I could be a handsome man at ninety.

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                        #12
                        Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                        Another OTFer has just SMSed me. "Errm no, dear colleague. As far as I am aware Tony Curtis never played in Spandau Ballet."

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                          #13
                          Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                          That bit where he got his hand chopped off in the Viking, or whatever it was called, really affected me as an impressionable 10-year-old. Still one of the most disturbing and graphic pieces of violence I've ever seen on screen.

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                            #14
                            Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                            That thing Incandenza posted is amazing.

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                              #15
                              Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                              Especially for people who know only Yvonne DeCarlo as Leticia in The Munsters.

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                                #16
                                Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                                As no-one else has mentioned it, Curtis was extremely good in The Boston Strangler, a role which also showed that his range was much wider than he's often given credit for.

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                                  #17
                                  Tony Curtis R.I.P.

                                  I agree with all the plaudits here. As a kid I thought he was fantastically handsome and cheeky, which is all you really want in a boy, and later appreciated his great acting.

                                  As an aside, 6 degrees an'all, Adam Ant dated his daughter Jamie for a while, and I'm told that both she and her Dad are/were lovely, friendly, and very funny people.

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