He was our Bernie, and he liked it hot

That Bronx connection was, surprisingly, intensely strong. Young Jews over here seemed to regard him as a neighbour from their part of town who had somehow been misplaced in New York, 3,000 miles away. There was intense pride in one of their own not just being a star, but being a tough guy, too - a streetwise kid of the kind they liked to think they were, too.

There was pride in one of their own being a star and a tough guy

His accent was pure Bronx - not so different, they might have thought, from the one they knew in Jewish Whitechapel. The inflexions were similar. The facial and hand gestures were instantly recognisable. He made no attempt to "posh" up his voice. Mid Atlantic for him would have been standing on a hot day in a stream near the deli with the pickle barrels outside.

Somehow, they regarded him as more Jewish. Until a week ago, Curtis and Kirk Douglas were the only survivors of the super-star era of the 1950s. Now, Douglas - who in recent years has gone out of his way to stress the importance of Jewishness, indeed, Judaism, in his life - is the only one.

And thereby hangs a tale. Jews, we were constantly being told, controlled Hollywood. In the days of the moguls that was almost true. Yet Jewish actors - as distinct from comedians and singers - were not encouraged. "Too Jewish" was Louis B Mayer's dictum about any number of hopefuls for whom he granted the privilege of screen tests. There were exceptions, of course - Edward G Robinson, Paul Muni and Melvyn Douglas stand out. But there were few who were so clearly as Jewish and so as clearly handsome as was Curtis.

Other actors played Jewish parts. Like it or not, Tony Curtis played them as Bernie Schwartz. That was why Sidney Falco in The Sweet Smell of Success was so real. He was nasty. But take away the unpleasantness and he could have been a grafter finalising a deal from a phone box in Stamford Hill. Playing the part of Harry Houdini in the Houdini film, he spoke to his screen father, the Hungarian rabbi, as he probably would have liked to have spoken to his own dad - the tailor who was never very fatherly - and to his schizophrenic mother. In real life, until the age of five he could only speak Hungarian - with a smattering of Yiddish. But he made up for it. At his funeral, his daughter Jamie Lee Curtis: "He was a bit meshuggah". Maybe that went with the sweet smell of his success.

I interviewed him 20 years ago for my radio programme You Don't have To Be Jewish, and of course we talked about the Jewish Hollywood connection. "You know," he told me, "too many people are too scared of their own skins. Why tell everyone you're Jewish? They think they've too many problems as it is. Me, I never gave a damn. But then, there is Jewish guilt…"

What he was guilty of, he did not say. But in his memoirs and in TV interviews, he revealed one of the most profound causes of that guilt was the death of his young brother Julius - run over by a truck after Bernie refused to let him join in one of his street games. Eventually, he was also to feel guilty about so much that he threw away - the marriages and the life which was not helped by drink and drugs. "Not many Jews do that, you think?" he said to me. "You'd be surprised."

Of course, he himself frequently surprised. He became an artist who could hold his head up high at the most prestigious galleries. When he did that, he did it with all the enthusiasm he had shown wearing high heels and kissing Marilyn Monroe in that film. He did everything at a pace that scared other people. If anyone told him to cool down, take things a little easier, he would have told them, colourfully, that that was not the way he did things. Bernie Schwartz was his own man at all times.

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