Best Known As: Pvt. Prewitt in the film From Here to Eternity
Montgomery Clift was a leading man of stage and screen, most widely known for his Oscar-nominated performance as Pvt. Prewitt in the movie From Here to Eternity (1953, with Frank Sinatra and Burt Lancaster). Clift grew up in the midwest and on the east coast, and started acting on Broadway as a teenager; by age 18 he was playing leading roles and was an early member of the prestigious Actor's Studio. He eventually moved on to Hollywood, where his brooding, reluctant-hero presence was a novelty and made him a popular leading man of the post-war era. His most notable roles -- for which he was also Oscar-nominated -- were in the films The Search (1948), A Place In the Sun (1951), and The Misfits (1961, Marilyn Monroe's last film). Clift is also known for the turmoil in his private life. His sexual preference was the subject of much speculation and he sometimes drank heavily, especially after a 1957 car crash that broke his jaw and nose and damaged his face badly. Clift and Elizabeth Taylor had a famous friendship and co-starred in the films A Place in the Sun (1951), Raintree Country (1957, with Eva Marie Saint) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, with Katharine Hepburn).
The song "Monty Got a Raw Deal" by the rock group R.E.M. is about Clift.
(born Oct. 17, 1920, Omaha, Neb., U.S. — died July 23, 1966, New York, N.Y.) U.S. actor. He acted on Broadway and was a founding member of the Actors Studio (1947). He made his film debut in The Search (1948) and became a star with Red River (1948). Noted for his serious, sensitive roles, he portrayed troubled heroes in films such as A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Young Lions (1958), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Freud (1962). Scarred by a car crash in 1956, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol and died of a heart attack at 45.
Career Highlights: The Heiress, The Misfits, Judgment at Nuremberg
First Major Screen Credit: Red River (1948)
Biography
Along with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift typified the emergence of a new breed of Hollywood star: Prodigiously talented, intense, and defiantly non-conformist, he refused to play by the usual rules of celebrity, actively shunning the spotlight and working solely according to his own whims and desires. A handsome and gifted actor, he channeled the pain and torment so rampant in his private life into his screen and stage roles, delivering remarkably poignant and sensitive performances which influenced generations of actors to come. Born October 17, 1920, in Omaha, NE, Clift began performing in summer stock at the age of 14 in a production of Fly Away Home. Within seven months, the play was running on Broadway, and throughout the remainder of his teen years he remained a fixture on the New York stage. Next, in 1935, was Cole Porter's Jubilee. In 1940, Clift also appeared with the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night, and in 1942 performed in The Skin of Our Teeth. His work in the Lillian Hellman smash The Searching Wind brought any number of offers from Hollywood, but he rejected them to appear in The Foxhole in the Parlor; finally, after earning acclaim for Tennessee Williams' You Touched Me, Clift agreed to make his film debut in the classic 1948 Howard Hawks Western Red River.
From the outset, Clift refused to play the studio game: He did not sign any long-term contracts and chose to work only on projects which intrigued him, like Red River. However, the film was so long in post-production that screen audiences instead got their first glimpse of him in Fred Zinneman's The Search, where unanimous praise for his sensitive, unsentimental, and Oscar-nominated performance made Clift among the hottest commodities in the business. He agreed to appear in three films for Paramount (only completing two): The first was William Wyler's 1949 adaptation of Henry James' The Heiress, with Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard scheduled to follow. At the last minute, Clift backed out of the project, however, to star in 20th Century Fox's 1950 war drama The Big Lift. Upon returning to Paramount, he starred in George Stevens' classic A Place in the Sun, earning a second Academy Award nomination for his performance opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who became his real-life confidante. Clift then disappeared from view for two years, coaxed out of self-imposed exile by Alfred Hitchcock to star in the 1953 thriller I Confess.
For Zinnemann, Clift next starred in the war epic From Here to Eternity; the film was the biggest success of his career, earning him another Best Actor bid (one of the movie's 13 total nominations; it took home eight, including Best Picture). After headlining Vittorio De Sica's Stazione Termini, Clift returned to Broadway to appear in The Seagull; in order to commit to the project, he needed to turn down any number of screen offers, including On the Waterfront and East of Eden. In total, he was away from cinema for four years, not resurfacing prior to the 1957 smash Raintree County; its success re-established him among Hollywood's most popular stars, but offscreen Clift's life was troubled. Tragedy struck when a horrific auto accident left him critically injured. He gradually recovered, but his face was left scarred and partially paralyzed. Still, Clift continued performing, delivering performances informed by even greater depth and pathos than before. His first project in the wake of the accident was 1958's The Young Lions, his first and only collaboration with Marlon Brando.
In 1959, Clift next reunited with Taylor for Suddenly, Last Summer, then starred in Elia Kazan's Wild River. In 1961, he co-starred in The Misfits (the final completed film from another Hollywood tragedy, Marilyn Monroe), then delivered a stunning cameo as a witness in the Stanley Kramer courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremburg. He then starred as Freud for director John Huston. The film was a box-office disaster, suffering a lengthy delay in production when Clift was forced to undergo surgery to remove cataracts from both eyes. He later sued Universal to recover his 200,000-dollar fee for the project; the studio countersued for close to 700,000 dollars, alleging his excessive drinking had doomed the picture's success. The matter was settled out of court, but it crippled Clift's reputation, and because of this, and his increasing health problems, he did not work for another four years until director Raoul Levy offered him the lead in the 1966 thriller Lautlose Waffen. At the insistence of star Elizabeth Taylor, he was then offered a supporting role in Reflections of a Golden Eye, but before filming began, he died of a heart attack at his New York City home on July 23, 1966. He was just 45 years old. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
Edward Montgomery Clift (October 17, 1920 – July 23, 1966) was an Americanfilm actor. He was known for his brooding, sensitive working-class character roles. He received four Academy Award nominations during his career.
Clift was born in Omaha, Nebraska, a son of William Brooks Clift,[1] a vice-president of Omaha National Bank, and his wife, the former Ethel Fogg. Clift had a fraternal twin sister, Roberta (aka Ethel), and a brother, William Brooks Clift Jr (born 1918), who had an illegitimate son with actress Kim Stanley.
The future actor's mother, who was reportedly adopted at the age of one year, nicknamed "Sunny", spent part of her life and her husband's money seeking to establish the Southern lineage that reportedly had been revealed to her at age 18 by the physician who delivered her, Dr. Edward Montgomery, after whom she named her younger son. According to Clift biographer Patricia Bosworth, Ethel was the illegitimate daughter of Woodbury Blair and Maria Anderson, whose marriage had been annulled before her birth and subsequent adoption. This would make her a granddaughter of Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General under PresidentAbraham Lincoln, and a great-granddaughter of Francis Preston Blair, a journalist and adviser to PresidentAndrew Jackson, and Levi Woodbury, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. None of these relationships, however, has been proven and remain speculative in the absence of documentation.
As part of Sunny Clift's lifelong preparation for acceptance by her reported biological family (a goal never fully achieved), she raised Clift and his siblings as if they were aristocrats. Home-schooled by their mother as well as by private tutors in the United States and Europe, in spite of their father's fluctuating finances, they did not attend a regular school until they were in their teens. The adjustment was difficult, particularly for Montgomery. His performance as a student lagged behind that of his sister and brother.
Clift was educated in French, German, and Italian.
Appearing on Broadway at the age of 13, Clift achieved success on the stage and starred there for 10 years before moving to Hollywood, debuting in 1948's Red River opposite John Wayne.
Clift was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor that same year for The Search. His sensitive and intense quality gave him an image as the kind of person to be taken care of.
Clift and Marlon Brando, who was also born in Omaha, had reputations as Hollywood rivals because of their rapid rise to stardom and similar acting styles. Clift was one of James Dean's idols and he would sometimes call Clift "just to hear his voice".[2]
Clift reportedly turned down the starring roles in Sunset Boulevard and East of Eden.[citation needed] At one point he was receiving so many offers of roles that friends had to squeeze past stacks of them in order to walk up the stairs.[citation needed]
On May 12, 1956, while filming Raintree County, he smashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving a party at the Beverly Hills home of his Raintree County co-star and close friend Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband Michael Wilding. Alerted by friend Kevin McCarthy, who witnessed the accident, Taylor raced to Clift's side, manually pulling his tongue out of his throat, as he'd begun to choke on it. He suffered a broken jaw and nose, a fractured sinus, and several facial lacerations which required plastic surgery.[3] In a filmed interview, he later described how his nose could be snapped back into place.
After a long recovery, he returned to the set to finish the film. Against the movie studio's worries over profits, Clift rightly predicted the film would do well, if only because moviegoers would flock to see the difference in his facial appearance before and after the accident. The pain of the accident led him to rely on alcohol and pills for relief, as he had done after an earlier bout with dysentery left him with chronic intestinal problems. As a result, Clift's health and looks deteriorated considerably.
His post-accident career has been referred to as the "longest suicide in Hollywood history" because of his alleged substance abuse.[4] Clift continued to work over the next 10 years. His next three films were Lonelyhearts (1958), The Young Lions (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Clift starred with Lee Remick in Elia Kazan's Wild River in 1960. In 1958, he turned down what became Dean Martin's role in Rio Bravo, which would have reunited him with John Wayne.
He then costarred in John Huston's The Misfits (1961), which turned out to be Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable's last film. Monroe, who was also having emotional problems at the time, famously described Clift as "The only person I know who is in worse shape than I am." By the time Clift was making John Huston's Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) his destructive lifestyle was affecting his health. Universal sued him for his frequent absences that caused the film to go over budget. The case was later settled out of court; the film's success at the box office brought numerous awards for screenwriting and directing, but none for Clift himself. Some time after the initial release of the film Clift appeared on the The Hy Gardner Show where he spoke at length about the accident and its effects, his film career, and treatment by the press. During the interview Gardner mentions that it is the "first and last appearance on a television interview program for Montgomery Clift".
Clift's last Oscar nomination was for best supporting actor for his role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), a 12-minute part. The film's director, Stanley Kramer, later wrote in his memoirs about how Clift—by this stage a wreck of a man—struggled to remember his lines even for this one scene:
"Finally I said to him, "Just forget the damn lines Monty. Let's say you're on the witness stand. The prosecutor says something to you, then the defence attorney bitterly attacks you, and you have to reach for a word in the script. That's all right. Go ahead and reach for it. Whatever the word may be, it doesn't really matter. Just turn to (Spencer) Tracy on the bench whenever you feel the need, and ad lib something. It will be all right because it will convey the confusion in your character's mind." He seemed to calm down after this. He wasn't always close to the script, but whatever he said fitted in perfectly, and he came through with as good a performance as I had hoped."
Death
On July 22, 1966, Clift spent most of the day in his bedroom in his New York City townhouse, 217 East 61st Street. He and his live-in personal secretary, Lorenzo James, had not spoken much all day. At 1 a.m., Lorenzo went up to say goodnight. The Misfits was on TV that night, and Lorenzo asked Clift if he wanted to watch it. "Absolutely NOT!" was the reply. This turned out to be the last time Montgomery Clift spoke to anyone. At 6 a.m. the next morning, Lorenzo went to wake him but found the bedroom door locked. Unable to break it down, he ran down to the garden and climbed a ladder to the bedroom window. When he got inside, he found Clift dead. He was undressed, lying on his back in bed, with glasses on and fists clenched.[5]
Clift's body was taken to the city morgue at 520 First Avenue and autopsied. The autopsy report cited the cause of death as a heart attack brought on by "occlusive coronary artery disease". No evidence was found that suggested foul play or suicide. It is commonly believed that addiction was responsible for Clift's many health problems and his death. In addition to lingering effects of dysentery and chronic colitis, an underactive thyroid was later revealed. A condition that (among other things) lowers blood pressure, it may have caused Clift to appear drunk or drugged when he was sober. (A further health issue, though unrelated, was that Clift underwent cataract surgery in his later years; afterward he had to wear glasses.)
Patricia Bosworth, who had access to Clift's family and many people who knew and worked with him, writes in her book, "Before the accident Monty had drifted into countless affairs with men and women. It suited his personality to have sex with a variety of partners. After the accident and his drug addiction became more serious, Monty was often impotent, and sex became less important to him anyway. His deepest commitments were emotional rather than sexual, and reserved for old friends; he was unflinchingly loyal to men like William "Bill" LeMassena and women like Elizabeth Taylor, Libby Holman, Nancy Walker and Ann Lincoln."
When he bought his Manhattan townhouse in 1960 at 217 East 61st Street and became involved in renovations, he reported to a close friend that he envisioned living there someday with a wife and children.[6][7] According to another biography, Clift's last known lover was Claude Perrin, a Frenchman who eventually became the actor's personal assistant before their relationship ended in the mid 1960s.
In popular culture
Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of The Clash wrote a song about Clift's post-accident life and decline, titled "The Right Profile", released on the band's London Calling album in 1979.
The group Random Hold perform the song "Montgomery Clift" on their 1980 album Etceteraville.
In the 1995 made for television movie, Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story, Clift was portrayed by actor William McNamara.
Noel Alumit's novel Letters to Montgomery Clift (MacAdam Cage), published February 2002, named after Montgomery Clift, who was the main character's favorite film actor.
The character Martin Crane (John Mahoney) mentions Clift during the eighth season of the television show Frasier.
Edward Norton's character Montgomery "Monty" Brogan in the film 25th Hour was named after Clift, whom Norton's mother was a big fan of.
In the 1991 movie City Slickers, Montgomery Clift is mentioned by Dr. Jessup in the first corral scene, while talking about driving cattle from Clift's movie, Red River.
In the 1986 David Lynch film Blue Velvet, the scene where Laura Dern's character Sandy Williams thinks over her relationship with Jeffrey while touching her breast, a portrait of post-accident Monty can be seen in the background.
The lead character in the James Kirkwood novel Hit Me with a Rainbow is told several times that he resembles Montgomery Clift. The character attributes this to Monty's recent death.
In the 1996 film adaptation of the novel Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor's character can be seen reading Robert Laguardia's 1977 biography of Montgomery Clift.
^ Clarke, Gerald. "Books: Sunny Boy". Time Magazine 20 Feb 1978.
^ Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: a Biography. James had been hired to help Clift restore his health while he waited out a lawsuit with a movie studio.
^ "A Place in the Sun, on East 61st Street: Montgomery Clift's house goes on the market," New York Magazine, June 12, 2006
