In Hollywood, celebrities who like to spend their free time indulging in the visual arts are so commonplace that they've become a cliché. Stars from Sylvester Stallone to Phyllis Diller to the late Dennis Hopper carved out oft-dubious side careers as artists, much to the delight of their fans and much to the consternation of serious art lovers.
Tony Curtis, who passed away Thursday at 85, was among the more passionate and prolific of Tinseltown's weekend artists. "I'd like to be known as an artist who acts rather than an actor who paints," he once said. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis issued a statement Thursday saying that her father "leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages."
Some people may think it strange to place Curtis' art dabblings on the same level as his film work in "Some Like It Hot" and "The Defiant Ones." But then again, Curtis wasn't strictly a dabbler. The actor devoted decades to his love of art and continued to paint long after the plum movie roles stopped coming his way.
He clearly took his art his seriously. In a 1989 interview with The Times on the occassion of his artwork being shown at the Beverly Hilton, Curtis explained that "when I start painting, I have no idea what I'm going to do. The first color I use -- that tells me where the painting is going. It paints itself, and the painting tells me when it's finished. It's almost as if it does it for me."
It often looks silly for amateur artists to list grand masters as their influences, but that didn't stop Curtis. He told The Times that he had been most inspired by Picasso, Matisse and Balthus.
Curtis continued to show his creations at venues around the world. He also sold some his artwork online.
As Times art critic Christopher Knight recently noted, the current museum climate looks kindly on celebrity art exhibitions -- which means that Curtis' paintings and other artwork could one day show up at an exhibition near you.
Read the full Times obituary of Tony Curtis.
-- David Ng
Photo: Tony Curtis at his easel. Credit: Shaun Curry / AFP/Getty Images
Image Credit: Pace Gregory/CorbisThe rare Hollywood star whose off-screen character was often more colorful than his on-screen ones, Tony Curtis has died at the age of 85. He passed away at midnight Wednesday night at his home in Nevada. The actor suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized in mid-July after he had trouble breathing.
Curtis lived a life that could easily have been made into a movie. Born Bernard Schwartz and raised in the Bronx, N.Y., to Hungarian immigrants, Curtis completed only one year of high school, spent two years in the U.S. Navy, and learned to act on the GI Bill, which led to a contract gig with Universal Studios. Graduating to bigger parts in films like 1952′s Son of Ali Baba and 1953′s Houdini, Curtis made a point of working in several genres.
As a result, his best-known films ranged from historical epics (1960′s Spartacus) to edgy noir dramas (1957′s Sweet Smell of Success) to farces (1959′s Some Like It Hot). But for every classic on his resume, he also appeared in more than his share of flops. He only earned one Oscar nomination in his seven-decade career, for the 1958 crime drama The Defiant Ones.
Curtis’ personal life was filled with great turmoil: He married five times; his first, and most famous, marriage was to actress Janet Leigh, with whom he appeared in Houdini after they had wed. The union lasted 11 years (the two divorced in 1962) and produced two daughters, the actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis (Trading Places). Tony Curtis had a rocky relationship with all of his children, including his eldest son, Nicholas, who died at age 23 of a heroin overdose in 1994. Curtis himself was arrested for marijuana possession in London in 1970, and spent a month at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984. Even into old age, he never lived quietly. “Eighty f—ing years old. I don’t feel any different now than I did when I was 30,” he told Esquire in 2006. “Dying, I just don’t feel like it.”
More Tony Curtis:
Tony Curtis remembers ‘Some Like It Hot’
This article titled “Tony Curtis: ‘The king of cool is on his way up, with syrup’” was written by Andrew Pulver, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 30th September 2010 16.09 UTC
The film world has been paying tribute after news of Tony Curtis‘s death at the age of 85, at home in Las Vegas. The Clark County coroner reported Curtis had a cardiac arrest.
In his 60-year career as a film actor, Curtis met and worked with almost everyone who was anyone in Hollywood’s glory years, from James Stewart in Winchester 73 to Robert de Niro in The Last Tycoon. In between he was directed by the likes of Douglas Sirk, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. He married Janet Leigh and they were the golden couple of the early 50s before divorcing in 1962.
In a prepared statement Curtis’s daughter with Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis, said: “My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world.”
Tributes have come pouring in for Curtis, even if his acting career diminished in quality and quantity after its 1960s heyday. Sir Roger Moore, who acted with him in the TV series The Persuaders in the early 70s, said: “We had a lot of laughs together for about 15 months, working together every day. He was great fun to work with, a great sense of humour and wonderful ad libs. We had the best of times.”
Because of his colourful personality and reputation as a carouser, Curtis became a popular chat show guest. Sir Michael Parkinson said: “He was an extraordinary man. Hollywood tried to make him into a sex symbol in the 1950s and 1960s but he was his own man. He was wonderfully indiscreet but he was very bright and did not take himself too seriously.”
Although they never made a film together, Curtis and Sir Michael Caine became good friends. Caine said: “When his time as a leading man was over he went off to Hawaii and painted. He had a very happy life. Every time I saw him he was the happiest man you could think of.”
The Twitterverse went into meltdown, with Curtis’s death following those of legendary director Arthur Penn and US comic Greg Giraldo. Marcgellen wrote: “Last of the great old school Hollywood actors, what a cool guy”, while nixonshepherd tweeted: “Classically handsome, unabashedly charismatic & sincerely genuine … the bygone traits of Hollywood’s golden age.” Laserblue summed it up best : “Step aside Steve McQueen, the real king of cool is on his way up, with syrup.”
Jamie Lee Curtis Hates Hollywood's "Conspiracy" Against Women
In the new issue of AARP The Magazine, Jamie Lee Curtis discusses the tremendous pressure on older actresses to get plastic surgery, and she plans to quit acting rather than going under the knife.
Curtis says:
Everybody is saying that to get jobs you have to dye your hair and get injectables. It's a conspiracy, a complete catastrophe, a surgical industrial complex. Somehow we are being fed this belief that to continue on we have to do this. Yet people are being disfigured. It's shocking what people are doing to their faces... There are people who, when you see them on the screen, there's an audible gasp of, 'Oh my God. They look terrible.' Or they've done something to themselves and now look like freaks.
Curtis adds that while a few natural-looking women like Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver are still winning good roles, she can name "30 other actresses" in their age group who can't find work. As for Curtis, she refuses to submit to the "surgical industrial complex" and says, "I'm getting my ass out of this business in a few years because genetically it's not going to work for me."
Hollywood's Plastic Surgery Industrial Complex [Sydney Morning Herald]
Send an email to Margaret Hartmann, the author of this post, at margaret@jezebel.com.
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