Re-Post from www.eonline.com
By: Joal Ryan
UPDATE: Jamie Lee Curtis has released a statement: "My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. 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 will be greatly missed."
Tony Curtis had one dream: to be in the movies. He succeeded. And how.
Curtis, a last link to a bygone Hollywood of classic films (Spartacus, Some Like It Hot, The Defiant Ones) and classic stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Cary Grant), died Wednesday. He was 85.
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Nevada's Clark County coroner says the entertainer and father of Jamie Lee Curtis died of cardiac arrest at 9:25 p.m. local time at his Las Vegas-area home.
Not the kind of actor who won awards—although he was nominated once for an Oscar—Curtis was the kind of star who won fans. And leading ladies.
"I was the handsomest of all the boys," Curtis told Britain's Daily Mail.
Curtis' good looks, if not his self-confidence, landed him an early role with Jimmy Stewart (Winchester '73), and an early marriage to actress Janet Leigh (Psycho). The couple had two children, including Jamie Lee.
"I'm just a lucky guy," Curtis said in a recent interview. "I was blessed."
The 1950s were Curtis' heyday. He made the racial parable The Defiant Ones, which put him on a chain gang with Sidney Poitier, the gender-bending Billy Wilder mob comedy Some Like It Hot, which put him and Lemmon in dresses, and which led him to rekindle a long-ago affair with Monroe, the ink-stained The Sweet Smell of Success, with Burt Lancaster, and the World War II submarine comedy, Operation Petticoat, with Grant.
In 1960, he made perhaps the ultimate epic, Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas' Roman-slave drama Spartacus, which paired him in a famously censored (and since restored) bathhouse scene with Laurence Olivier.
After the 1968 true-crime thriller, The Boston Strangler, Curtis' A-list run gave way to TV and movies such as The Manitou and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.
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