You have to wonder whether those legions of men who tried to look and dress like him would have chosen either the single Oscar Curtis won (for Sweet Smell of Success) or his affair with Marily Monroe, one of many – including a young Natalie Wood – that he was only too happy to discuss publicly.
But more than that, more than films such as Spartacus and Some Like It Hot and The Boston Strangler, more than having a haircut named after him, more than being considered the best looking heterosexual man in Hollywood, he was a mensch.
He was proud of his Jewishness even if he was not particularly religious and fought antisemitism whether that was with his words or with his fists.
American actor Tony Curtis at his London home in 1973 (Photo: Getty)Getty Images
Plenty of other celebrities are immortalised in statues of themselves but Curtis has a very different statue in his honour and if you have never seen it then I recommend you do.
It is the Tree of Life Memorial in Budapest, designed by Imre Varga in 1991 and funded by Curtis’s Emanuel Foundation – Emanuel was the name of his Hungarian father. It is a tree of stainless steel and on every leaf is the name of a Hungarian Jew who died in the Holocaust.
It stands over a mass grave in the Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe. It is unusual to find graves within the grounds of a shul but during the war it was part of the ghetto and 2,600 Jews are buried there, having been murdered by the Nazis and the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s own far-right organisation in the war.
Seeing it and the synagogue, rebuilt in the 90s with help from Curtis’s foundation, I found to be as emotional in many ways as other memorials from Yad Vashem to Auschwitz, perhaps because of its simplicity, striking beauty, location and very human reminder but also, perhaps, because it was the brainchild of Curtis – a man remembered by most for his acting, womanising, incredible good looks and having a haircut named after him but who decided late in his life to actually do something he considered more worthwhile.
Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in New York on 3 June 1925. Jews of the same generation – my own father was born a year later – came to idolise him and refer to him as “our Bernie” would try and get their hair to look the same and dress like him. Even Elvis was said to have styled his barnet after Bernie.
For the first five years of his life, growing up in the Bronx, Curtis spoke Hungarian with a smattering of Yiddish before developing that familiar “Noo Yoik” slur which, it was feared by some, would be a barrier to his career when he went into acting.
US Hollywood actor Tony Curtis poses for pictures as he showcases his artwork at an exhibition in Harrods in 2008. (Photo: Getty)AFP via Getty Images
The cliché of a tough upbringing in one of New York’s roughest neighbourhoods does not do it justice in Curtis’s case. He and his brother Julius were sent to an institution when his schizophrenic mother felt she could no longer care for him. Julius was killed when he was hit by a truck – Tony felt he was to blame as Julius wanted to play with Tony and his mates and was turned away.
He served in the US Navy during the war, witnessed the surrender of Japan first hand, and went into ‘the movies’ never softening either his accent nor his ethnicity. As his acting career faded into cameos for TV and film, he took up painting and won acclaim for his art.
It would take a book to go through the rest of his life so read one instead – I recommend Curtis’s second memoir, American Prince, published in 2008, two years before he died. It’s one of the best celebrity autobiographies I’ve read, hilariously indiscreet, brazenly open and honest about his failings but overall, a story about the life of a truly great man, a truly great Jewish man.
