The late Tony Curtis, who died yesterday at the age of 85, was once one of the most popular and celebrated actors in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the same things that made him a star drove his career into the doldrums in his later years.
Curtis had some acting talent, but his popularity and box office appeal were really based on his rather prissy handsomeness, a quality that elevated several other actors to stardom at the same time: Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, Warren Beatty, etc. Curtis gave some appealing performances and conveyed a good deal of personal charm on-screen.
Once his looks faded, as they must for all, he could not find a persona that would work for him as a middle-aged and then an elderly man. The hustling scammer type was a good character for him in his early years, and it made his career, but he wanted to play the hero.
It was not to be. Curtis just didn’t have the seriousness and evident strength of character that are required to make audiences like a person as an antihero (as, for example, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, and Dennis Hopper did). There was a certain slightness to Curtis’s persona that ultimately held him back.
The intense personal ambition that fueled Curtis’s hustler persona helped make him a star, but it kept him from maturing into someone whom audiences could appreciate in his forties and beyond. He was a good actor, and one can appreciate his accomplishments, but he could have been indispensable.