Montgomery Clift

Publish date: 2024-05-03

Have you read this article about Monty (Montgomery Clift: better than Brando, more tragic than Dean)?

Here are the highlights of this article:

Clift’s upbringing was unconventional. His father was a banker whose fortunes fluctuated. But his mother raised him, his twin sister Ethel and their older brother Brooks like young aristocrats, taking them abroad on ocean liners and having them schooled by tutors at home. The young Montgomery exuded charm, but was plagued with self-doubt and a shaky sense of his own identity. He found refuge in theatre, winning his first rave reviews on Broadway before turning 18, then going on to star in plays by Thornton Wilder (who became a friend) and Tennessee Williams.

Howard Hawks saw him on stage and offered him a role in Red River, a western starring John Wayne. Their animosity on screen extended off-set: Wayne described Clift as “an arrogant little bastard”, while Clift felt uneasy in the macho on-set atmosphere fostered by Wayne and Hawks. Yet his performance made him a star.

He was set to star in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film of Sunset Boulevard, as screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis opposite Gloria Swanson as ageing silent movie queen Norma Desmond, but backed out at the last minute.

The 30-year-old actor was conducting a secret liaison with singer-actress Libby Holman, 16 years his senior, a state of affairs that would have been considered scandalous. But then that was true of Clift’s conflicted sexual life in general. He had several homosexual relationships, though his brother said he had “met two girls he got pregnant. He was never exclusively one thing or the other; he swung back and forth”. Elizabeth Taylor, one of Clift’s closest friends, confirmed this tendency in him. To add to his problems, around 1949 Clift had started drinking heavily, having barely touched alcohol in his formative years.

Clift declined the lead in East of Eden (it went to Dean), and instead paired up again with Taylor in Raintree County (1957), a pleasant if inconsequential Civil War romance that rode on the coat-tails of Gone with the Wind.

By the time Red River was released in 1948, Clift had already played the lead in The Search, a moving post-war drama about a GI who cares for an eight-year-old Czech boy, a war refugee. Not knowing (or maybe just not caring) how Hollywood did things, Clift, concerned that the story was becoming too sentimental, rewrote dialogue, aiming to strike a more realistic, almost documentary note. This infuriated the film’s producer, but director Fred Zinnemann later conceded that some of Clift’s revisions had helped the story. Clift was nominated for his first Oscar.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3TmqOorZ6csm%2BvzqZmraCimq6le5Bqa2traWaGbrnOp6ugp52av7p5wqWgn6w%3D