Operation Petticoat

Blake Edwards was born William Blake Crump on 26 July 1922 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a family with roots in the film industry through his stepfather's side. He began in Hollywood as a bit-part actor in the 1940s before moving into writing, contributing radio scripts and screenplays, and then into television, where he created the series Peter Gunn (1958) and Mr. Lucky. His feature directing career opened with comedies and light dramas before Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), starring Audrey Hepburn, established him as a major director able to mix romance, comedy and melancholy. He followed it with the far darker Days of Wine and Roses (1962), a study of alcoholism, demonstrating a range beyond the comic reputation he would later be known for. In 1963 he introduced Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther, launching a franchise with Peter Sellers that became the commercial backbone of his career across several sequels into the 1970s and 1980s. Edwards married the actress Julie Andrews in 1969, and the two frequently worked together, notably on 10 (1979), which made a star of Bo Derek, and Victor/Victoria (1982), for which Edwards received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay. His career had highs and public failures alike, including expensive flops that damaged his standing with studios in the 1970s, but he continued directing into the 1990s. He received an Honorary Academy Award in 2004 for his body of work. Edwards died in Santa Monica, California, on 15 December 2010, aged eighty-eight, of complications from pneumonia.

Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925 to Hungarian immigrant parents, and was open throughout his life about having consciously built his public persona from nothing — a self-transformation he credited explicitly to watching Cary Grant, whose own reinvention from working-class Bristol he cited as a direct model. Curtis co-starred with Grant in Blake Edwards's naval comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), playing a fast-talking junior officer opposite Grant's submarine commander. That same year, Curtis delivered the most famous celebrity impersonation ever committed to film: his performance in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), in which his character adopts a mock-wealthy suitor persona modeled directly on Grant's voice and manner. Grant's reported response, relayed in multiple later interviews, was that he did not actually talk like that — a remark that has become one of the most quoted lines in Grant's own biography, even though he never denied Curtis's admiration. Curtis's other major credits bracket that period: Sweet Smell of Success (1957), playing a venal press agent opposite Burt Lancaster; The Defiant Ones (1958), which brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor; and Spartacus (1960), in Stanley Kubrick's epic. Across these roles Curtis moved between light comedy and serious drama more successfully than most of his contract-era contemporaries. He continued acting into the 2000s and died in Las Vegas in 2010, having spent much of his later career discussing, with evident affection, the debt his own screen persona owed to Grant's example.