Blog Assignment #19- Tony Curtis

        Tony Curtis was a huge Holwood star. He was in over 100 films. He is popular for being in "The Defiant Ones" and for being Houdini. "My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages," his daughter actress Jamie Lee Curtis said in a statement. "He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world." He died today at the age of 85. He was a great actor.
           Tony Curtis's real name was Bernard Schwartz. His parents were Hungarian Jewish.Hungarian was Curtis's only language until he was five or six.His father was a tailor and their family lived in the back of the shop. His mother had made one appearance on a television show called "You Bet Your Life". Curtis said, "When I was a child, Mom beat me up and was very aggressive and antagonistic." His mother had a mental disease called schizophrenia. The disease also effected his Brother, Robert.
        He did both screen comedy and drama together and became the most sought after star in Hollywood. He appeared often on television shows. He was mostly in movies. In the early 1960s, he was immortalized as "Stony Curtis," a voice-over guest star on The Flintstones. I saw the episode of The Flinstones that he was in. It was a really good episode.
               Throughout his life, Curtis enjoyed painting, and since the early 1980s, painted as a second career. His work commands more than $25,000 a canvas now. In the last years of his life, he concentrated on painting rather than movies. He said "I still make movies,but I'm not that interested in them anymore. But I paint all the time." In 2007, his painting The Red Table was on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His paintings can also be seen at the Tony Vanderploeg Gallery in Carmel, California.
         He got married six times. His first wife was actress Janet Leigh,with whom he fathered actresses Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis. He divorced Leigh in 1962 to marry Christine Kaufmann, the 17-year-old German co-star of his latest film, Taras Bulba. He stated, however, that his marriage with Leigh had effectively ended "a year earlier". In 1963 Curtis married Kaufmann. They had two daughters, Alexandra  and Allegra. They divorced in 1968. Kaufmann resumed her career, which she had interrupted during her marriage.