Born On This Day- October 17th... Beautiful & Tragic Montgomery Clift

He made his Broadway debut at 13 in Fly Away Home, & continued to work on the Broadway stage for the next decade before being lured to Hollywood. He was friends with & an inspiration to James Dean & Marlon Brando. They were the trio of brooding & intense young actors that were trying on a new style of naturalistic acting personified by The Actors Studio in NYC. Montgomery Clift thought he was under-valued as an actor, but was, in fact, extremely accomplished & well regarded by critics & fellow actors. He would receive 4 Oscar nominations, 1 for his 2nd film- The Search. Clift was also an isolated & tortured, closeted gay man who used drugs & alcohol to escape his pain. Although he was gay, he maintained close relationships with several actresses, the closest of which was with Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor & Clift were both passionate & vulnerable people who felt a bond immediately. They worked together on several films, beginning with George Stevens' A Place in the Sun in 1951 (his 2nd Oscar nom), & remained best friends until the end of his life. He was teased & ridiculed by Frank Sinatra for being gay during the making of From Here To Eternity (his 3rd nomination).

On May 12, 1956, after leaving a party at Taylor's, Clift drove his car into a telephone pole (8 months after his friend James Dean died in a similar accident). The crash caused scarring & partial paralysis of his beautiful face. He continued to act, & gave some of his most memorable performances after the accident: Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (an Oscar nomination for a 7 minute role) & John Huston's The Misfits in 1961, but his expressive acting & his personal life were never the same. Clift made 16 films before the crash, & 16 films after.

Clift plunged more deeply into drug & alcohol abuse & wild sexual behavior. He began to be considered unreliable by studio bosses. By the time his lover Lorenzo James found him naked & dead of a heart attack at their home in Greenwich Village, on July 23, 1966, he was virtually unemployable. He was just 45 years old.