Montgomery Clift is best remembered for his roles in Howard Hawks's Red River, George Stevens's A Place in the Sun, Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, and John Huston's The Misfits.
57 Facts About Montgomery Clift
2.
Montgomery Clift executed a rare move by not signing a contract after arriving in Hollywood, only doing so after his first two films were a success.
3.
Edward Montgomery Clift was born on October 17,1920, in Omaha, Nebraska.
4.
Montgomery Clift's mother was Ethel Fogg "Sunny" Clift.
5.
Montgomery Clift's parents were Quakers and met as students at Cornell University, marrying in 1914.
6.
Montgomery Clift had a twin sister, Roberta, who survived him by 48 years, and an older brother, William Brooks Montgomery Clift, Jr.
7.
Montgomery Clift had English and Scottish ancestry on his father's side, wealthy relatives who hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
8.
Montgomery Clift spent the rest of her life trying to gain the recognition of her alleged relations.
9.
Montgomery Clift had shown an interest in acting and theatrics as a child living in Switzerland and France but did not take the initiative to go out for a part in a local production until age 13, when his family was forced to downsize and relocate from Chicago to Sarasota, Florida.
10.
Close to a year later, around the time the family moved again, settling in New York City, Montgomery Clift debuted on Broadway at 14 years old as Harmer Masters in the comedy Fly Away Home which ran from January to July 1935 at the 48th Street Theatre.
11.
Montgomery Clift instead continued to flourish onstage and appeared in works by Moss Hart and Cole Porter, Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder, creating the part of Henry in the original production of The Skin of Our Teeth.
12.
In 1939, as a member of the cast of the 1939 Broadway production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, Montgomery Clift participated in one of the first television broadcasts in the United States: the Hay Fever performance was broadcast by NBC's New York television station W2XBS and was aired during the 1939 New York World's Fair.
13.
Montgomery Clift had participated in radio broadcasts early in his career, though, according to one critic, he hated the medium.
14.
Also in 1951, Montgomery Clift was for the first time cast as Tom in the radio world premiere of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, with Helen Hayes and Karl Malden, for The Theatre Guild on the Air.
15.
Montgomery Clift did not serve during World War II, having been given 4-F status after suffering dysentery in 1942.
16.
Montgomery Clift spoke so quietly that at times he was practically inaudible.
17.
Montgomery Clift shifted his moods erratically, from a brooding pose to a bursting smile.
18.
Montgomery Clift tended to funnel most of his energy into intense rehearsals with acting coach Mira Rostova who accompanied him on set.
19.
Montgomery Clift worked extensively on his character, and was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
20.
Montgomery Clift's main acting rival, Marlon Brando, was so moved by Clift's performance that he voted for Clift to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, sure that he would win.
21.
That year, Montgomery Clift voted for Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
22.
Montgomery Clift visited Jones several times at his home in Arizona and Illinois and modeled the character after Jones himself.
23.
Montgomery Clift supported and mentored Frank Sinatra in his role as Private Angelo Maggio.
24.
Montgomery Clift had veered off one of the twisting hairpin turns and smashed into a telephone pole and the surrounding cliffside.
25.
Montgomery Clift pulled a hanging tooth that was cutting into his tongue, before accompanying him into the ambulance.
26.
Montgomery Clift suffered a concussion, broken jaw, broken nose, fractured sinuses, fractured cheekbones, and several facial lacerations which required plastic surgery.
27.
Montgomery Clift began to behave erratically in public, which embarrassed his friends.
28.
Montgomery Clift was willing to waive his fee entirely but accepted the supporting part with minimum compensation.
29.
On January 13,1963, a few weeks after the initial release of Freud, Montgomery Clift appeared on the live television discussion program The Hy Gardner Show, where he spoke at length about the release of his current film, his film career, and treatment by the press.
30.
Montgomery Clift talked publicly for the first time about his 1956 car accident, the injuries he received, and its aftereffects on his appearance.
31.
Elizabeth Taylor put her salary on the line as insurance in order to have Montgomery Clift cast as her co-star in Reflections in a Golden Eye, to be directed by John Huston.
32.
In preparation for the shooting of this film, Montgomery Clift accepted the role of James Bower in the French Cold War thriller The Defector, which was filmed in West Germany from February to April 1966.
33.
The schedule for Reflections in a Golden Eye was then set for August 1966, but Montgomery Clift died in July 1966.
34.
In 2000, at the GLAAD Media Awards, where Taylor was honored for her work for the LGBT community, she made the first public declaration by anyone of the fact that Montgomery Clift was gay and called him her closest friend and confidant.
35.
When Montgomery Clift began therapy in late 1950, he informed his psychiatrist that he was homosexual and struggling to cope with it.
36.
Many of Montgomery Clift's biographers note his relationships with men and some few women based on friends' accounts and interviews.
37.
Montgomery Clift was linked to actresses Libby Holman and Phyllis Thaxter.
38.
Montgomery Clift was involved with the Adventures of Superman actor Jack Larson and theater actor William LeMassena, with whom he had a three-year relationship.
39.
Montgomery Clift described their relationship with fondness and kept taped film reels of Clift and the company of There Shall Be No Night enjoying leisure time together.
40.
Montgomery Clift was deeply and intensely involved with Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins; very few associates were aware of how intimate and emotionally charged the relationship between the pair was.
41.
In 1948, when Montgomery Clift left Robbins to pursue a movie career in Hollywood, the announcement devastated Robbins.
42.
Montgomery Clift told Clift "I could make you love me," at the end of their two-year affair.
43.
Robbins is said to have conceived the basic plot of West Side Story after Montgomery Clift shared the idea with him, according to actor Russ Tamblyn.
44.
Montgomery Clift attended the New York premiere of A Place in the Sun in August 1951 as his date.
45.
McDowall devoted himself entirely to Montgomery Clift and moved from Los Angeles to New York to be closer to his idol.
46.
Montgomery Clift later stated that he could never have finished the film without McDowall's moral support.
47.
James Jones and Montgomery Clift became very close during the filming of From Here to Eternity.
48.
Montgomery Clift was involved with Donald Windham and his partner Sandy Campbell.
49.
Montgomery Clift was friends with Marlon Brando, who dropped by his home offering to accompany him to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
50.
Montgomery Clift supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 United States presidential election.
51.
On July 22,1966, Montgomery Clift was in his New York City townhouse, located at 217 East 61st Street.
52.
Montgomery Clift's body was taken to the city morgue about 2 miles away at 520 First Avenue, and autopsied.
53.
The condition lowers blood pressure; it could have caused Montgomery Clift to appear drunk or drugged when he was sober.
54.
Montgomery Clift received and declined offers for roles in the following films:.
55.
In 1960, Montgomery Clift was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6104 Hollywood Boulevard.
56.
Montgomery Clift was the subject of fascination by the character Vikar in the film Zeroville, which was shot in 2015 and released on September 20,2019, in limited theaters, to largely negative reviews.
57.
Montgomery Clift was a major supporting character in the 2020 feature film As Long As I'm Famous, which explored his intimate relationship with a young Sidney Lumet during the summer of 1948.