Jamie Lee Curtis confirmed this morning her father died last night of cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas home Wednesday night. This has not been a good week for Hollywood and the Grim Reaper. We have lost Arthur Penn, Eddie Fisher, Gloria Stuart, and now screen legend Tony Curtis. Curtis was a throwback to classic, perhaps mythic, Hollywood of decades ago. I have been a Curtis fan for a long time. Some of my favorite of his films are Spartacus, Houdini, Operation; Petticoat, Boeing Boeing, The Great Race, and my personal favorite, The Defiant Ones, for which he received a Oscar nomination. I even recall fondly his voice appearance as Stony Curtis on an episode of The Flintstones.
My appreciation for his films has deepened as I have gotten older and more discerning in my entertainment choices. While Curtis had a well earned reputation for playing the tough guy/ladies man, he deserves much credit for his diversity I roles. He plausibly played a wide number of character types, including drag.
It was the brief time period in the early ’90’s when VH-1 began airing Hollywood Babylon, a rather tawdry series exposing the darker side of Hollywood, that I first realize Curtis was a representative of a classier Hollywood that was dead and gone. From time to time, he would tell an anecdote from those days which stood in stark contrast to te tabloid material the bulk of the show presented. The stories told, along with the obvious joy he had in once being a part of them, was a bittersweet reminder of a fading Tinsel Town.
A very large part of that Tinsel Town is now gone forever. Godspeed, Mr. Curtis.
