By Jessica Davis, JTNews Correspondent
“Is this Jessica Davis?” asks actor Tony Curtis as he phones from Delaware for his interview.
“Yes,” I reply.
“I’ve been waiting to talk to you my whole life,” he quips.
At 77, Curtis is still the same charming heartthrob many admired in his younger days. In his lifetime, he has starred in more than 100 films, including Spartacus, The Boston Strangler, Trapeze, The Great Race, Sweet Smell of Success and The Defiant Ones, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
He received lifetime achievement awards from the Italian Oscars in May of 1996 and in Spain in 2001. He was knighted in France in March 1995, with the Chevalier De L’Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres for his work in films and his original art works. Curtis has also been honored by the USA Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
He first gained attention in a Greenwich Village stage adaptation of Golden Boy, and was quickly offered a contract by Universal Pictures. His screen debut had him dancing with Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross.
In the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians Joe and Jerry, who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day-massacre in Prohibition-era Chicago. Fearing for their lives, they dress as women (Josephine and Daphne) and flee to Florida with an all-girl band.
To impress Sugar (played by Marilyn Monroe), his love interest, Curtis dons an additional pseudo-personality as Junior, a rich heir to the Shell Oil Company. Meanwhile, Lemmon gets mixed up with Osgood Fielding III, an eccentric millionaire (played by Joe E. Brown). In 2000, the American Film Institute ranked Some Like It Hot as the funniest American movie ever made.
A two-act musical, the stage adaptation of Some Like It Hot visits Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, April 29–May 4. This time, Curtis, the lone surviving star of the original film production, gives up his role of the saxophone player Joe, for that of Osgood. This is his first stab at singing and dancing since the 1954 film, So This Is Paris. To prepare for his current touring show, he took singing and dancing lessons.
After touring for almost a year, Seattle is the last stop for Some Like It Hot — unless it makes it to Broadway. “We’ve had a long run,” said Curtis.
The actor himself has lived a full life. Curtis was born as Bernard Schwartz in Manhattan in 1925. As the oldest of three sons, he enjoyed going to shul with his Orthodox father. He also remembers how his father Emanuel, a tailor, would dress up to play Hungarian melodies on his violin. Curtis’s parents immigrated to New York from Hungary in the 1920s.
In the 1930s, growing up in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx, Curtis would get his revenge on the non-Jewish kids by climbing up on rooftops of abandoned tenement houses and tossing condoms filled with bodily fluids on them.
As a Jewish kid who was also handsome, Curtis said he had two strikes against him. Even today, with the violent situation in the Middle East, Curtis said, as a Jew, he feels like a target anywhere he goes.
Upon completing high school, Curtis enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943. After his release, Curtis used the GI educational program to study drama. In 1945-1946, early in his acting career, Curtis appeared in Yiddish theater in Chicago, although he did not speak Yiddish. His lines were written out phonetically. Because the theater director thought the name Bernard Schwartz made him sound Italian, he went by B. White.
In the mid-40s, to avert anti-Semitism, Curtis permanently changed his German-sounding last name of Schwartz to Curtis (a variation of Kertez, the last name of one of his Hungarian relatives). He changed his first name to the classy-sounding Anthony, which was shortened to Tony. Despite the name change, Curtis has never strayed much from his Hungarian-Jewish roots. He still observes the holidays, opting for Orthodox services. Also, while touring, he attends services in every city he visits.
In 1990, Curtis went to his father’s hometown of Mateszalka, not far from the Russian border. He became the spokesperson for The Emanuel Foundation for Hungarian Culture, an association named after his father. The foundation raises funds to renovate Hungarian synagogues, including the Doheney Synagogue (the central synagogue in Budapest), where his father prayed almost 100 years ago. The interior of the synagogue was all but destroyed by the Nazis. A memorial at the building commemorates those who perished during the Holocaust, including some of Curtis’s family.
When he is not on tour, Curtis lives with wife Jill Ann VandenBerg, 32, in Las Vegas. “It’s fabulous to live there,” he said, adding that the weather is excellent.
He has kept himself busy with many interests in addition to acting: playing saxophone and flute, writing novels, and his major passion — art. He sells and exhibits a collection of his artwork on his own website, www.tonycurtis.com.
“It’s like a little museum,” he said.
His bright acrylic canvases, with assemblages, collages and boxes that have been compared to Matisse, are in the private collections of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Sinatra and Kirk Douglas. His originals are also on display in museums and galleries around the world. Posters of some of his artwork will be for sale in the lobby of the show.
Some Like It Hot takes place at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, April 29–May 4. Tickets are $20-$58. Call 206-292-2787 or visit www.theparamount.com.