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Appreciating Montgomery Clift, born 91 years ago
So beautiful, so talented, so gay.
Movie icon Montgomery Clift, whose movie credits included From Here to Eternity, Judgement at Nuremberg and A Place in the Sun, was born 91 years ago today.
The four-time Academy Award nominee was close friends with Elizabeth Taylor with whom he starred in A Place in the Sun with and also in Raintree County and Suddenly Last Summer.
His beautiful face was badly damaged during the filming of Raintree when he crashed his car on a canyon road in Los Angeles while leaving a dinner party at Taylor’s home.
His looks deteriorated after years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse to deal with the pain from the accident and he also struggled with the fact that he was gay.
Clift died in 1966 when he was just 45 years old. The official cause of death was occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis with pulmonary edema.
But he lives on forever in his movies.
Comments
(All comments are reviewed before being published, and I review submissions several times per day.)
vanndean says:
I was a college sophomore, at Stephen F. Austin State University. Upon his death, I hid in the theater department and cried for three days. To have lost my second crush so soon after losing the first love of my life in a hunting accident, nearly did me in. Fortunately, we live over life’s tragedies and move on with living our lives and trying to find someone alive that we can love. The were the times of mostly loving from afar while experiment with the rise of the sexual revolution.
Stephen Mead says:
721486!
Clock on. You’re being paged,
A year, a movie reel. Tin sealed
It in, a nice cool quiet slumber.
That was the life!
We were “The Misfits”. Montgomery
Clift, Marilyn, at their good ripened
Cheese stage, one the thin-skinned
Punch drunk poet, the other tender as ever.
Off the set, their personal worlds
Were crumbling, human, a surplus of
Dichotomy. Now,
On the wall, projected flat cut outs,
Two figures writhe: Clark Gable and his
Horse, a rope between tethering both.
To wrestle the majestic and have
The toughness be sensitive—–
To get dragged, dodge hooves, then
Bring down the stallion bucking, is
To know wildness has dignity:
Gable, bleeding, winded, honoring
Respect, cutting Pegasus loose. On
The road, driving back, Monty, in my mind’s
Eye, a stray to be held, Clark and Marilyn,
A pair dissimilar but oddly connected by some
Dog and three horses in front, the car, a
Seed pod, the wind, a runway, home-delivered
By the largest star in all of that black, and us,
Just a couple of screen hounds equally searching
For meaning amid a sticky floor and creaking
Velvet seats…
Oh movie buff, matinee chum, can you dare
Envision, remember?
I can and speak of it.
Instead of a number,
We each had a name
Stuart Falk says:
Thanks for posting this tribute. He was an exceptionally fine actor.
Sportsfan says:
I Monty was alive today while at the height of his career, instead of Liz, he would be playing opposite Jim Parsons for today’s TV audiences.
Charlie says:
He was a beautiful, talented man. He died too soon.