October 17, 1920– Montgomery Clift made his Broadway debut at 13 years old in something titled Fly Away Home (actually, it was a hit comedy starring Mary Wickes) & he continued to work on the Broadway stage for the next decade before being lured to Hollywood. He was friends with & an inspiration to James Dean & Marlon Brando. They were a trio of brooding & intense young performers that were trying on a new style of naturalistic acting personified by The Actors Studio in NYC.
Clift felt he was under-valued as an actor, but he was, in fact, extremely accomplished & very well regarded by critics & his fellow actors. He received 4 Oscar nominations, the first for his second film, The Search (1948).
Clift was also an isolated, tortured, closeted gay man who used drugs & alcohol to escape his pain. The characters he played were often lost, confused souls. Although he was gay, he had close relationships with several female actors. The closest was Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor & Clift were both passionate & vulnerable young people who felt a bond the moment they met. Taylor claimed that he took her breath away the first time that she laid eyed on him. They worked together on several films, beginning with George Stevens‘ A Place In The Sun (1951), bringing his second Oscar nomination. From what I have read, Taylor & Clift were basically lovers minus the sex part. They remained BFFs until the end of his life.
He did have an affair with Taylor’s very good friend, actor Roddy McDowall, who attempted suicide after their breakup.
Usually popular on the set, Clift was teased, bullied & ridiculed by Frank Sinatra for being gay while making of From Here To Eternity, which gave him his third Academy Award nomination (1953).
On May 12, 1956, after leaving a party at Taylor’s place, Clift drove his car into a telephone pole (8 months after his pal James Dean died in a similar accident). The crash caused scarring & partial paralysis of his beautiful face. He continued to act & gave some of his most memorable performances after the accident: Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), with his fourth Oscar nomination (this one for a 7 minute role) & John Huston‘s The Misfits (1961), but his expressive acting, beautiful face & his personal life were never quite the same. Clift made 16 films before the crash, & 16 films after.
In an attempt to keep his encounters with guys discreet, Clift would travel to gay popular resorts like Ogunquit, Maine, & Fire Island. He seemed to have gone in for rough sex. In 1949 he was arrested on 42nd Street in NYC for soliciting, but his film studio found a way to have charges dropped without being noticed.
In the early 1960s, in pain from his injuries physical & emotional, Clift plunged deeply into drug & alcohol abuse, & alarming behavior, including a particularly volatile affair with director/choreographer Jerome Robbins (a #BornThisDay honoree last week). He began to be considered too unreliable by studio bosses & their insurance companies & the acting offers dried up. By the time his last lover Lorenzo James found him naked & dead of a heart attack at their home in Greenwich Village, on July 23, 1966, Clift was virtually unemployable, broken & broke. When he took his final curtain call, Clift just 45 years old.
His 15 minute funeral was at attended by 150 guests, including Lauren Bacall & Sinatra. Clift is buried in the Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
If he had lived, Clift would have celebrated his 95th birthday today. I like to think that he would have continued to work in film, maybe even enjoying a triumphant return to Broadway. In the 21st century he might have found a new audience on TV, starring with Betty White in series adaptation of On Golden Pond for HBO.
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