Stephen McGinty: Another falling star in Hollywood

TONY Curtis was a star - it took a Glaswegian to make him an actor. There is a scene in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) where Curtis, as the hustling publicist Sidney Falco is asked where he wants to go?

"Way up high, Sam, where it's always balmy. Where no-one snaps his fingers and says: 'Hey, shrimp, rack the balls!' Or, 'Hey, mouse, mouse go out and buy me a pack of butts'. I don't want tips from the kitty. I'm in the big game with the big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell, and I didn't dream it in a dream, either. Dog eat Dog. In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me."

The eight decades of Tony Curtis's long life are encapsulated in those eight sentences, and the man who directed him through one of his finest performances was Alexander MacKendrick, former pupil of Hillhead High School and graduate of the Glasgow School of Art.

In the billowing shroud of newsprint produced in response to the sad news of Tony Curtis's death, it is understandable that more space was given to his multiple matrimonial matters and his wild life than his best work in front of the camera; this, after all, was a man who shared the same number of wives as Henry VIII, still at least he was enough of a gentleman to opt for divorce rather than decapitation. However, I'm sure many of his wives would have relished their own opportunity of a free swing with a sharp axe. Then again, maybe they would have preferred to aim below the waist rather than above the neck. As a priapic satyr Curtis was in a league of his own, so relentless was he in pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh that some agents prohibited him acting alongside their clients. In an ironic twist, despite being married to his sixth wife, a mere 46 years younger, he welcomed the wilting that comes with old age. Refusing Viagra, he said the decline in his sex drive had left him "much happier now".

In 1957 Curtis was still married to his first wife, Janet Leigh, and would be for another five years, when he joined the cast of Sweet Smell of Success. At the time his own agent was unsure of the wisdom of playing a scheming press agent who would pimp his girlfriend for a favourable mention in the syndicated column of JJ Hunsecker played by Burt Lancaster.

Hunsecker was based on Walter Winchell, the New York columnist who in the 1930s was one of the most powerful men in showbusiness, whose column could make and did break careers and who operated from a table at the Stork Club, one fitted with its own phone line. He was the Perez Hilton of his day- though bloggers and columnist take note - just two people attended his funeral.On the set Tony Curtis and Alexander MacKendrick bonded over bad childhoods. The son of Scots immigrants, Francis and Marth Mackendrick, Alexander, or Sandy, to his friends, was born in Boston, but at the age of six his father died during the global flu epidemic of 1918. Desperate to remain in employment as a dress designer, Martha handed over her son to her father, who returned with him to Glasgow. He never saw or heard from his mother again. Curtis, by comparison, heard all to often from his own mother, Helen Klein, who along with her husband, Emmanuel Schwartz, were immigrants from Hungary. Helen was an undiagnosed schizophrenic who frequently beat her two sons.

When later asked what he got from his mother, Curtis replied: "I got nothing from her. I got slapped around is what I got." At the age of eight he and his brother were placed in an orphanage when his parents couldn't afford to feed him. They were collected a month later when suitable funds emerged. The darkness at the heart of his childhood was the death of his younger brother, Julius, who was struck and killed by a truck. For the rest of his life the actor carried a shred of guilt for refusing to play with him that day.

After graduating from Glasgow School of Art and working as an art director for the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, Mackendrick found success with Ealing comedies such as Whisky Galore and The Man in the White Suit before trying his luck in Hollywood. Both men were under considerable pressure during filming, with Mackendrick convinced he would be sacked by Lancaster, who was also the producer and a frustrated would-be director, while Curtis had to contend with learning reams of dialogue a few minutes after it had been ripped the typewriter of Clifford Odets, who was re-writing the script as they went along. Yet just as pressure works on carbon, it also produced a diamond on the streets of New York. A dark film which could cut through glass.

There will be film fans who will haul out the DVD of Some Like It Hot this weekend in tribute to the passing of a legend, but I'll be watching young Tony, or as Hunsecker describes him: "A cookie full of arsenic," light up the screen in what remains a pitch-black movie. Among my favourite lines is Falco's retort after having carried out a nefarious task: "Cat's in the bag. Bag's in the river." Then there is Burt Lancaster barking at Curtis, "You sound happy, Sidney. Why should you be happy when I'm not?"

I suppose what illuminates Curtis is the visceral hunger for that sweet smell. The background of anti- semitic abuse he endured, the poor schooling and the knowledge that with a better background he could have been a "politician or a surgeon… but I didn't have education so there wasn't anything I could do but movies."

I think there is a quality that is found in that old generation of Hollywood actors, a stoicism that comes from a tough childhood and service during the Second World War.Jimmy Stewart may have been Hollywood's Mr Nice Guy, but watch him in Winchester '73 and you catch a glimpse of the tough guy who piloted bombers over Germany. Lee Marvin drowned the horrors of fighting the Japanese in whisky and carried that haunted look through films like Point Blank. We think of Tony Curtis in a woman's frock and never the naval uniform of a sailor who served in the Pacific and watched the Japanese surrender. It knocks the tough guy posturing of today's generation of actors into a cocked hat.

Yet I can't help but feel sad as another slender thread that ties the present to the golden age of Hollywood snaps. Tony Curtis was a better actor than he was ever given credit for, and anyone who wishes to enjoy a historical romp with exhilarating action sequences, axe-hurling and a tricky spot of oar dancing should check out The Vikings.

In Sweet Smell of Success, JJ Hunsecker said a line to Curtis's Falco with deep malice, today it is sadly true and so I quote it here in tribute: "You're dead, son. Get yourself buried."