Dennis RomeroYou want to see a wicked IMDB entry, look up Tony Curtis. His first work shows up in 1949, and he was rumored to be working on a project that would be released next year. He died of a heart attack at age 85 Wednesday in his Las Vegas area home.
The handsome actor never faded but was perhaps best known for his work in the 1950s and 1960s, including Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot and Spartacus.
He also has offspring you might have heard of, Jamie Lee Curtis.
Fans and well-wishers were at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6817 Hollywood Blvd. Wednesday morning, where flowers were being placed.
The New York Times:
As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot”; a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick's “Spartacus” (1960); a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli's “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).
-With reporting from City News Service. Got news? Email us. Follow us on Twitter, too: @dennisjromero.
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