Montgomery-Clift

The aura of cinematographic myth suits Montgomery Clift as well as James Dean , in fact there are three similarities in their lives that unite them like few other stars: they coincided working at the same time, the 50s; the two actors shared an extremely close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor , who would almost become his mentor; and both died young after busy and rebellious lives. But also, in Monty’s case, the roles fit his life like a glove to a hand. He specialized in depressed characters, with a tormented life, and whose cloudy and deep gaze expressed an emotional vulnerability bordering on imbalance.

Edward Montgomery Clift was born in Omaha (Nebraska) on October 17, 1920. His precocity in the world of acting was amazing, since at the age of 14 he made his Broadway theater debut with “Fly Aways Home”. He also participated in a play by Elia Kazan entitled The Skin of Our Teeth and gradually became a theater celebrity in New York, the city where he always lived.

His jump to the cinema came from the hand of the great Howard Hawks , under whose direction Montgomery Clift shot Red River (1948), a western masterpiece with John Wayne as the headliner. The same year, he obtained the first of his four Oscar nominations with Lost Angels , directed by Fred Zinnemann , and after turning down the role of William Holden in The Twilight of the Gods , he was definitively established with The Heiress (1949), by william wyller. As can be seen, the best directors counted on him: few actors played in such an intense and convincing way. His identification with the Stanislavski method (living the character from within) was portentous.

But in the early 50s, illnesses began to take a toll on his always fragile health and Montgomery Clift began a long and painful idyll with alcohol and pills. In 1951 he met Liz Taylor in George Stevens’ outstanding A Place in the Sun. The actress became Monty’s best and most faithful friend, always sympathetic to his unstable character. He triumphed again when Hitchcock used him to be the harassed priest in I Confess (1953), but after filming the same year with Vittorio de Sica ( Termini Station ) and Fred Zinnemann ( From Here to Eternity) Montgomery Clift suffered a car accident from which he would not recover. He disfigured his face and, although after several surgeries he returned to work, drugs and alcohol had already taken over his life. Yes, he shot outstanding works, such as Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), under Mankiewicz’s orders, although he was on the verge of being expelled from the project for being drunk.

The most remembered later works by Montgomery Clift are Wild Lives (1961), by John Huston , where he shared the decline of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe , and Winners or Losers (1961), where he offered his best testament with ten minutes of amazing performance. But Monty’s life was ending prematurely and inexorably. His last appearance was in The Deserter , the same year in 1966 that he was found dead of a heart attack at the young age of 45.