Tony Curtis

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.