Montgomery Clift

With Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman, he was the greatest actor of his generation. Edward Montgomery "Monty" Clift was born on October 17th, 1920 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father William Brooks Clift was a banker, vice-president of the Omaha National Trust Company. His mother, whose maiden name was Ethel Anderson Fogg, was nicknamed "Sunny". His family had English, Dutch and even Scottish origins. He was born six years after his parents' marriage, with his twin sister Ethel, and thanks to their father’s economic efforts they could travel together in the United States and throughout Europe and learn French and German very well. The Thirties’ Great Depression, however, financially ruined their father, who had to move with the family to New York. Montgomery didn’t adapt himself to conventional schools and studied acting. In the summer of 1935 he debuted on Broadway. Ten years later he went to Hollywood (through Actor's Studio) and in 1948 he made his grand debut with John Wayne in Red River, a classic western directed by Howard Hawks. The same year he was nominated for an Oscar for The Search, under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, a film unfairly forgotten where Montgomery gives his best as a soldier. In the film he takes care of a Czech child who survived the Nazis. In the following two years another two masterpieces: The Heiress directed by William Wyler and A Place in the Sun by George Stevens. Two ambitious characters who aim to money and success, in the first movie cheating a rich but not pretty girl, and in the second one committing an unpremeditated murder during a trip with a female worker, because he prefers a rich girl that can give him a prosperous future. The actresses who worked with him in these two films are Olivia De Havilland (Oscar winner for The Heiress), Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor, who he will then have a long friendship with. Then, between 1952 and 1953, he met Alfred Hitchcock for I confess, Vittorio De Sica for Terminal Station but above all he is directed for the second time by Fred Zinnemann in the masterpiece From Here to Eternity. At the same time, he rejected the parts in two other masterpieces that will mark two other great actors’ careers: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, with James Dean and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, with William Holden. In 1956, while he was shooting Raintree County by Edward Dmytryk, he had a car accident (a year after James Dean died for the same cause) and became heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol. The movie will arrive in theatres at the end of 1957, with many problems on set. In 1958 he played with Marlon Brando and Dean Martin in the war film The Young Lions, once again directed by Dmytryk. In 1959 he played a character who had many similarities with his life, in Suddenly, Last Summer directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with his friend Elizabeth Taylor and the great Katherine Hepburn. After Wild River with Lee Remick, directed by Elia Kazan, he again made a great performance in John Huston's The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. There is still time for two other interesting films: Judgment at Nuremberg by Stanley Kramer, a choral film more important for the screenplay than the individual convincing interpretations surrounding the film's star Maximilian Schell, who will win the Oscar; Freud: The Secret Passion with Susannah York and directed by John Huston. The last film, before his death, is mediocre: The Defector. His friend Liz tried to include him in Reflections in a Golden Eye, once again directed by Huston, but he died because of a heart attack before the shootings and has been replaced by his friend Marlon Brando.