Tony Curtis

"Even Elvis wanted to be like Tony Curtis. But, for that matter; almost every man in the fifties and sixties wanted to be Tony Curtis - including Tony Curtis himself. What nobody knew was that, all the while, Bernie Schwartz of the Bronx was keeping just a step ahead of the crowd, trying to invent Tony Curtis for himself." "From his boyhood in the Depression-era New York streets - back when he was a fast-footed, quick-witted kid, the son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants - through forty years as an eminent screen idol, Tony Curtis's story is a skeptic's trip through the Elysian fields of stardom." "He credits the Cary Grant film Destination Tokyo with inspiring him to leave high school and enlist for submarine service in World War II. But when he came to Hollywood, after studying at New York's Drama Workshop with Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte, he followed his own imperatives. Pigeonholed as a "baron of beefcake" through many of his early roles, he finally broke out with lead parts in the hard-hitting social films Sweet Smell of Success and The Defiant One. And his classically outrageous performance in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot marked him permanently as the kind of actor who would go a long way to prove his versatility." "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography pulls no punches: Curtis debunks myths of stardom and glamour with a raw, uncensored, street-honed New York bite. The scope of his memoirs includes: rooming with Marlon Brando in Hollywood in the late forties; a glamorous marriage to Janet Leigh in 1951, and the extraordinary days during his first flush of success; his co-billed star role in The Defiant One with Sidney Poitier, the first time a black actor received such attention; his social involvement with Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack"; the making of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (including details of the legendary bath scene with Laurence Olivier); a fully detailed description of his descent into alcohol and cocaine addiction in the 1970s and 1980s; and his therapeutic, ongoing work as a visual artist, drawing his inspiration from Matisse and Joseph Cornell." "Tony Curtis met and worked with all the acting and directing icons of his day and this book is a candid and tantalizing probe inside the classic years of the movie business - both the incredible decadence and the numbing, grinding hard work. Curtis was once undervalued as just a pretty face, but in reality he was a dogged student of film technique; his insights on how actors were trained, used, and often destroyed by elements beyond their control have an obsessive truth-seeking quality to them. Here, too, is the dark side of Hollywood glamour, as embodied by the sad stories of Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate - and Curtis's own scrapes with disaster." "From swashbuckling films of the forties to recent movies like Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance and the Martin Scorsese production Naked in New York, Curtis's storybook career makes him the most penetrating, firsthand performer-authority on Hollywood that we have. Controversial, flip, shot through with a charming defiance and an off-the-wall sense of humor, Tony Curtis: The Autobiography must be read by anyone in love with American movies and the truth behind the icons."--BOOK JACKET.