THE RELEVANT QUEER: Montgomery Clift, Actor and Screen Idol, Born October 17

“I don’t want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do – not what we say we are.”

TRQ: Montgomery Clift, Born October 17, 1920

Actor Montgomery Clift, who was nominated for four Academy Awards, was born in Omaha, Nebraska on October 17, 1920. Clift often played the role of the sensitive, brooding young man of the post-World War II generation.

He worked alongside Hollywood’s best, including his friend Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Katharine Hepburn. Clift also appeared in plays by Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder, and movies by Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and George Stevens.

Professionally, he was a method actor who put exhaustive development into his characterisations, and influenced the work of his friends Marlon Brando and James Dean. Privately, he struggled with drugs and alcohol to escape both the pain from a car accident and the isolation of being a professionally closeted gay actor.

Clift’s early life was one of privilege. His father was the vice-president of a bank. His mother wanted her children to be raised as aristocrats and had Clift and his siblings privately tutored. They often travelled throughout the United States, the Bahamas and Europe, and spoke French and German fluently.

When Clift was 9, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression devastated his family’s financial security. They moved to a small home in Sarasota, Florida. There Clift discovered acting in a teen community theatre and in 1933, he played the role of a performer in As Husbands Go.

Though his brother attended Harvard and his sister attended Bryn Mawr College, Clift opted out of going to college. Instead, with the encouragement of his mother, Clift pursued an acting career. With his family having moved to New York, he appeared on Broadway in 1935 at age 15, playing the role of Harmer Masters in Fly Away Home. Also that year, Clift played Prince Peter in Cole Porter’s Jubilee. In 1938 he appeared in several Broadway plays, but his performance in Dame Nature established his acting career.

Though he caught Hollywood’s attention early on, Clift waited nearly ten years before making his film debut in Red River (1948), opposite John Wayne. Nominated for two Academy Awards, the film focuses on the tension between the Clift’s sensitive cowboy and the hardened adoptive father played by Wayne.

That year, Clift also appeared in Fred Zinneman’s The Search (1948), for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. The film also won an Academy Award for screenwriting, after Clift reworked the script. He followed with performances in The Heiress (1949), and The Big Lift (1950), and his status as a Hollywood sex symbol skyrocketed.

“Monty could’ve been the biggest star in the world if he did more movies.” -Elizabeth Taylor, in Montgomery Lift: A Biography (1978) by Patricia Bosworth.

In 1951, Clift appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun and delivered one of his most highly regarded performances. To achieve a sense of naturalness, he spent a night in a state prison in preparing to play a death row inmate, and rejected Stevens’ suggestions to overplay the character. The film was a critical and commercial success. Clift received another Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. Clift was now a true screen idol, and he and Taylor were marketed as Hollywood’s most beautiful couple.

At the peak of his Hollywood career, Clift appeared alongside Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Donna Reed in Fred Zimmerman’s From Here to Eternity (1953). The film won eight Academy Awards, with Sinatra taking home Best Supporting Actor, and Reed winning Best Supporting Actress. Clift and Lancaster were both nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Critics and fans alike often regard Clift’s performance in this film as one of his finest.

With Clift’s success in Hollywood came changes to his lifestyle. While he had sexual and deeply emotional relationships with women, he was open about his sex with men when around other actors. Jack Larson remembers Clift’s intense kiss after they first met.

Through the 1950s, Clift started drinking and using drugs more. He spent more of his nights cruising for gay sex. During the summer of 1954 he hosted S&M parties with men in Ogunquit, Maine. The studios worked overtime to keep the screen idol’s sex life out of the press.

Clift’s life changed on May 12, 1956. He fell asleep while driving home from a party at Taylor’s home in Beverly Hills and hit a telephone pole. With a broken nose and jaw, several severe gashes, and a fractured sinus, Clift’s face was scarred and partially paralysed. Even after plastic surgery, his appearance was permanently altered.

Nevertheless, two months later Clift returned to production. He finished the film Raintree Country, which was a commercial success. Never one to take on too many projects, he starred in many films after the crash. He gave memorable performances in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). Clift earned another Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance in Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg (1961).

Yet, after the wreck, Clift’s addiction to drugs and alcohol devastated his career. By the 1960s, studio executives considered him unemployable. Taylor battled to have him cast in a new film for the two, Reflections in a Golden Eye, which explored themes of repressed sexuality. Unfortunately, Clift never started production.

On July 23, 1966, Clift’s private nurse and companion, Lorenzo James, found him in a bathtub dead from a heart attack in their townhouse in New York. He was 45. Friends credit James with trying to keep Clift healthy. Medical experts suspect that dysentery, chronic colitis and a thyroid condition not only caused him to appear intoxicated when sober but also contributed to his fatal heart condition.

Lauren Bacall and Frank Sinatra, along with 150 other guests, attended Clift’s funeral. Taylor was filming in Rome and sent flowers. A month later, Brando, Clift’s longtime friend and admirer, replaced him in the film with Taylor.

In 2000, Taylor shared that Clift was gay, and that he had been her closest friend when she was honoured at the GLAAD Media Awards for her support of the LGBT community.

About the Authors:

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and he is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

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Sources:

GLBTQ Archive

The Guardian

Vanity Fair

Biography