Word: clift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
File Carr's appraisal for the moment under "glamour" and consider all that De Niro-Pacino-Hoffman talk going around as so much well-intentioned rooting interest. The movie star Travolta most clearly calls to mind is Montgomery Clift. Travolta may lack the depth of Cliffs gifts, but he has much the same quicksilver charm. He too can give an audience the sense of immediate but always fragile intimacy, of shared secrets, of private truths known without speaking...
...fascinating story, and Patricia Bosworth, who received the cooperation of Clift's family, has turned it into compelling reading. The cooperation was necessary because Clift's problems, to a unique and peculiar degree, began long before he was born. His mother, whom everyone called Sunny, was an abandoned child who grew up in the family of a drunken steelworker in Germantown, Pa. Only when she was 18 did she learn from the doctor who delivered her that she was descended from two of the most illustrious families of America, the Blairs of Maryland and the Andersons of Virginia...
...children-Brooks, Monty and Monty's twin sister Ethel-spent most of their early years at Eastern resorts or in Europe. The kids were privately tutored, and Sunny prevented them from mixing with anyone outside the family. She refused to lower her expectations even after Bill Clift lost his money in the Depression. Though the Clifts moved to a one-room apartment in Greenwich Village, the sheets were made of silk, and the table was always set with sterling silver...
Hollywood summoned the actor early on. L.B. Mayer, the head of MGM. supposedly broke down in tears when Clift said: "Your scripts are bad, Mr. Mayer, and I don't want to be typecast -that'd ruin me." Finally, when he did go West for Red River, it was on his own, precedent-setting terms, and he did not have to sign the standard seven-year contract that had hobbled so many earlier stars. His best parts came in the early '50s, in A Place in the Sun with his friend Elizabeth Taylor, and in From Here...
...problem on guilt over his homosexuality - or bisexuality, as she maintains it was - but the evidence is totally unpersuasive. Good as her book is, it offers no real reason for Monty's down fall, which was as mysterious as his talent. In one of his last illnesses Clift was visited by his mother, cheery as always. "Oh Ma," he finally cried, "give me your strength. I need your strength." That was the one thing Sunny could not give him, then or ever...