Credits roll on rags-to-riches life of a movie icon

Tony Curtis has died, aged 85, a man who had travelled light years from humble beginnings as the son of poor Jewish-Hungarian immigrants

growing up in the Bronx. His was the classic miracle journey of ghetto kid to Hollywood heart-throb – a tale filled with childhood trauma,

grim poverty and vicious anti-Semitism. When his easy good looks provided an entre into Hollywood in the late '40s he was persuaded to change his name from Bernie Schwartz to Tony Curtis, and so a star was born.

Curtis himself never stopped being grateful for his amazing luck. He once said "Beauty is America's lottery and celebrity is America's royalty. Listen, everyone gets into the movies because of their looks. I can never get over the fact that I'm in the movies. It was hard to hide my enthusiasm, even if I played a killer."

And, indeed, Curtis did play killers. In his most memorable role he was schizophrenic mass murderer Albert De Salvo in The Boston Strangler, a part he fought for. It was his best performance but after it his career declined. By the 1970s he was appearing on British television as playboy Danny Wilde in The Persuaders! alongside Roger Moore as aristocrat Lord Brett Sinclair.

Curtis became a star in the early 1950s and there was a succession of movies good, bad and indifferent. The one that followed him around for his entire career was 1954's The Black Shield of Falworth, with Curtis as a medieval knight. "Yonda lies da castle of my Fadda, de caliph", he intones at one point. You can take the boy out of the Bronx…

It was easy to scorn Tony Curtis as just another movie star. But, like Robert Mitchum before him and Steve McQueen after, he was a much better actor than he gave himself credit for.

His most creative period was between 1956 and 1960. At its height he was voted biggest box-office star in four successive years. He worked for Stanley Kramer on the ground-breaking mixed-race pot-boiler The Defiant Ones, co-starring with Sidney Poitier and Oscar nominated as a white trash convict; for Stanley Kubrick in Spartacus (cast beside legends Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons and Peter Ustinov) and for Alexander Mackendrick in the gloriously sour Sweet Smell of Success, giving a chilling portrayal of an unscrupulous press agent.

Perhaps the stand-out picture of the lot was Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder's sparkling comedy in which Curtis played three roles and perfectly mocked his idol Cary Grant's accent.

Naturally he enjoyed a brief affair with co-star Marilyn Monroe, but was later to describe their intimate scenes on-set as like "kissing Hitler". After her death he called her "unmanageable, unpleasant,

dirty".

Throughout his wayward life he enjoyed the ladies. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands. "I was the king of the hill then," he

recalled, "and I didn't leave a skirt unmoved." His second marriage, to Janet Leigh, foundered due to his philandering.

Curtis lived for fame and the rewards it gave him. He was volatile, cocksure, moody, erratic, paranoid, possessive, obsessively jealous and terribly insecure.

He was a lousy father to his six children – four daughters (including Jamie Leigh Curtis) and two sons, one of whom died from a heroin overdose. As he turned 50 he crashed, disappearing into a blizzard of cocaine. A spell in the Betty Ford Clinic straightened him out, but by then the glory days were over.

As he entered his 70s he refused to play patrician roles – doctors, lawyers, grandfathers – and until recently kept up a hectic pace of life. "You are looking at a machine made for the movies. I will never play old men on the screen – there is always a little energy that you can see. 'Old' to me is giving up on life. You can be any age you want."

The day before his 77th birthday he opened in a coast-to-coast tour of a musical version of Some Like it Hot, singing and dancing as eccentric millionaire Osgood Fielding. Friends told him to slow down. Curtis's response was to be expected: "To do what? To go where?"

He died with his sixth wife, former lingerie model Jill Vanden Berg, by his side. Married for 12 years, they met when he was 67 and she was 23. Curtis was asked by one astonished paparazzo: "Isn't it dangerous

having sex at that age?"

Curtis gazed at his Amazonian spouse and said: "If she dies, she dies…"

n Tony Earnshaw is artistic director of the Bradford International Film Festival and the Yorkshire Post's film critic.