Tony Curtis: a life in clips

He was young, he was pretty and he came fired by ambition. As a contracted Hollywood actor, the youthful Tony Curtis found himself shoehorned into all manner of substandard (and at times wildly inappropriate) studio outings. In The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) he plays a hardy swashbuckler in the time of Henry IV. "Yonder stands the castle of my faddah," he is reputed to say at one stage. Except that he never actually did. The line was actually concocted by critics to poke fun at the actor's broad Bronx accent.

Few films better captured the corrupt underside of 1950s Manhattan than The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with its swooping jazz soundtrack, smoke-filled saloon bars and poisonous inhabitants. Curtis rustled up a tour-de-force as Sidney Falco, the smooth-cheeked press agent who schemes, flatters and cajoles his way through the New York newspaper scene. "Match me, Sidney," orders Burt Lancaster's cigarette-smoking columnist, implicitly inviting Curtis to go toe-to-toe with him in a battle for acting supremacy.

In The Defiant Ones (1958), Joker (Curtis) is a swaggering white racist, Noah (Sidney Poitier) a brooding African-American. Together they escape a chain gang and forge through the Deep South, shackled to each other by the ankles. Stanley Kramer's race relations parable may look a little crude and hectoring these days, but the full-bodied performances keep it afloat. Curtis's role as Joker earned him his only best actor Oscar nomination.

Richard Fleischer's longboat epic was big and brash and noisy. The New York Times dismissed it as a "Norse opera" but the public lapped it up and it sealed Curtis's place in the front-rank of bankable Hollywood stars. He plays Erik, the young pup who comes of age and ignites the wrath of his hard-bitten half-brother (Kirk Douglas).

Spare a thought for Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), two jazz musicians who flee the mob, dress up in drag and re-cast themselves as Josephine and Geraldine. Except that Joe also goes by the name of Junior (at least when he is pretending to be a Shell Oil millionaire) and Jerry dislikes the name Geraldine and wants to be called Daphne instead. Five decades on from its first release, Billy Wilder's freewheeling comedy remains a cherished classic; warm, witty and slyly subversive. Marilyn Monroe co-stars as wayward Sugar Kane, who always winds up with "the fuzzy end of the lollipop".

Stanley Kubrick's muscular Roman epic Spartacus stars Kirk Douglas as the rebel slave, Laurence Olivier as a wealthy general and Peter Ustinov, who won an Oscar for his turn as a wheedling trader. Curtis languishes further down the bill and was brought in late, by Douglas himself, to lend the tale a little extra "star power". But he gives a fine, supple performance as Antoninus, the Sicilian slave who throws in his lot with Spartacus's army. His crucial scene – the controversial "oysters or snails" bath-house conversation with Olivier – was only restored to the film in 1991.

In later years, Curtis would always cite The Boston Strangler as his greatest screen role. Playing serial killer Albert DeSalvo, he dyed his hair, stuck black contact lenses in his eyes and gained 15lbs. But what really impresses is his anguished, unblinking intensity. Even the film's dated visual trickery – the split screens, the frames within frames – can't distract from that.

After The Boston Strangler, Curtis's career began to fade and he started to settle into pampered, fat-cat middle age. Monte Carlo or Bust was an indulgent, car-racing comedy that cast him alongside the likes of Dudley Moore, Willie Rushton and Hatti Jacques. If not quite bust, Curtis's stock was clearly on the slide.

To misquote Norma Desmond, Tony Curtis stayed big, it was just the screen that got small. In 1971 he found a new lease of life courtesy of Lew Grade's gilt-edged detective series. The Persuaders cast Curtis and the pre-Bond Roger Moore as a pair of playboy crime-fighters – one from the mean streets of New York, the other from the playing fields of Harrow. Four decades on, that opening credit sequence (replete with John Barry score) remains a thing of wonder.

The public, it seems, like their movie stars to be entertainers off screen as well as on: expansive, charming and altogether larger than life. Tony Curtis fit the bill. He was a roustabout and a raconteur, quick to laugh and quick to cry – endearingly overcome by his own good fortune and never afraid to poke fun at himself. Here he is, on the small screen again, in What's My Line.