Montgomery Clift is one of the first American actors in "Golden Hollywood" to adhere to Stanislavsky's "natural acting" method. Despite the fact that during his short film career he managed to star in only 20 films, Montgomery Clift was nominated four times for America's most prestigious Oscar and went down in the history of world cinema.
Childhood and early years
Edward Montgomery Clift was born on October 17, 1920 in Omaha, Nebraska. “Monty,” as the family called him, was the son of William Clift, a successful Wall Street broker, and his wife Estelle, a housewife. In addition to him, the family had two more children: his twin sister Roberta and brother Brooks.
Clift's early years passed happily. When his father left town for work, which was quite common, the mother took the children with her on a trip to Europe or to Bermuda, where they had a second home.
In 1929, there was a major collapse in the American stock market, which affected the financial well-being of the family. The Clifts were forced to settle in Sarasota, Florida and lead a more modest life.
At the age of 13, Montgomery discovered a passion for theatrical activity. Then he joined the local theater troupe. His mother approved of her son's hobby and advised him to develop creativity. Shortly after the family moved to Massachusetts, he auditioned for Broadway and landed a role in the play "Fly Away Home."
After the family changed their place of residence again, this time settling in New York, Montgomery again starred on Broadway, this time in the lead role in the play "Dame Nature". This gave him, then only a 17-year-old aspiring actor, the title of Broadway star. Over the next decade, he continued to appear in Broadway productions such as There Shall Be No Night, The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town and many others.
Career in Hollywood
For several years, Montgomery Clift turned down offers from Hollywood filmmakers. However, he made an exception for the film Red River (1948), which was also the first post-war project directed by Howard Hawke.
In the same year, the audience saw Clift in another film, The Search, which not only put the actor on the list of Hollywood stars, but also earned him his first Oscar nomination.
Over the next decade, Montgomery Clift continued to star in films that were consistently highly praised by both critics and audiences: A Place in the Sun (1951) with Elizabeth Taylor, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller I Confess (Confess, 1953) and From Here to Eternity (1953) with Bert Lancaster, Frank Sinatra and Deborah Kerr as colleagues.
last years of life
In May 1957, Montgomery Clift, returning from a party at Elizabeth Taylor's California home, lost control and crashed into a telegraph pole. This not only affected his appearance, but also caused psychological problems. By that time, he was already quite heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs, and this incident only exacerbated the problem.
Despite the fact that due to health problems and addiction to drugs, many directors chose not to work with Clift, thanks to his friendships with the actors, he continued to get jobs. He received especially great support from Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he actually had a friendship, and not a romantic relationship attributed to the press. Nevertheless, he stopped getting the main and romantic roles, quite often embodying negative characters or "victims of circumstance" on the screens - for example, his role in the film "The Misfits" (1961) almost completely reflected his personal fears and problems.
However, even under the circumstances, Clift continued to delight critics with the quality of his work. In 1961, he again received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in the film Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), although his character appeared on the screen for only 7 minutes, and such movie stars appeared in the film like Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster.
During the filming of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Elizabeth Taylor waived her royalties on the condition that Montgomery Clift, who was experiencing a period of unemployment in those years, would be approved as the main actor. However, filming had to be postponed due to the fact that at that moment Clift began filming in "The Defector" ("The Defector", 1966), in which he played the role of an American physicist assisting a CIA agent. The start of filming for "Glare in the Golden Eye" had to be postponed once more, this time to August 1966, but this time was prevented by the sudden death of Montgomery. Marlon Brando was later approved for his role.
Montgomery Clift passed away on July 23, 1966 from a heart attack at his home in New York.
Personal life
For Hollywood in those years, Montgomery Clift became a completely new type of "protagonist." Unlike the assertive heroes of the 40s, he played vulnerable and vulnerable characters, although he could just as reliably embody a negative role. Unsurprisingly, the press was interested in how the famous screen heartbreaker lives in real life. While most journalists attributed his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Clift played most of his most popular films, the actor's close friends kept the fact that he was actually bisexual from the public.
Patricia Bosworth, an American writer who knew Clift and his entourage intimately, wrote in her memoir: “Before the incident (car accident), Monty had many affairs with both women and men. After a car accident and serious drug problems, sex was no longer important to him. His closest relationships were more emotional than sexual, and his social circle narrowed to a few old friends."
Despite the fact that his non-traditional sexual orientation was not a secret for close friends and the professional circle, Montgomery Clift never officially announced this. The most important person in his life, however, is considered Elizabeth Taylor, who was very involved in his life. Their friendship lasted until Clift's death. In 2000, while receiving the GLAAD Media Awards, which Elizabeth Taylor received for her support for LGBT people, Taylor publicly confirmed for the first time that Montgomery Clift was homosexual.
