The actor Tony Curtis has died at the age of eighty five.
Tony Curtis made more than a hundred films during his career, rising to prominence in the late 1950s with lead roles in The Sweet Smell of Success and The Defiant Ones.
It will perhaps be Billy Wilder’s comedy classic Some Like It Hot, for which he’ll be best remembered. Curtis starred alongside Jack Lemon as musicians, who hide from the mob by posing as women in an all-female band, which includes Marilyn Monroe.
But later films such as Spartacus and The Boston Strangler showed that he was equally adept at drama as comedy.
Tony Curtis was the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants and went on to have a private life as interesting as any of the characters he played on screen. After a brief relationship with Marilyn Monroe, he married the actress Janet Leigh. One of their daughter is the actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
This was the first of six marriages for Tony Curtis, his widow being more than forty years his junior.
He suffered cardiac arrest at his home near Las Vegas.