“Monty could’ve been the biggest star in the world if he did more movies.”
Elizabeth Taylor

Edward Montgomery “Monty” Clift (October 17, 1920 – July 23, 1966) was an American actor. His New York Times obituary noted his portrayal of “moody, sensitive young men.” He is best remembered for roles in Red River, The Heiress, A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, Judgment at Nuremberg and The Misfits. He received four Academy Award nominations during his career.
Along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, Clift was one of the original method actors in Hollywood – yet has been largely forgotten among modern audiences.
Clift was one of the first actors to be invited to study in the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. He also executed a rare move by not signing a contract after arriving in Hollywood, only doing so after his first two films were a success.
Born in 1920 in Omaha, Nebraska, Clift was raised like an aristocrat, with a private tutor and frequent trips to Europe. While he never excelled at school, his extraordinary abilities as an actor showed early. By 15, Clift made his Broadway debut in Cole Porter’s Jubilee. Over the next 10 years, he earned prominent roles in plays by Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder, opposite stars like Fredrick March and Tallulah Bankhead. Hollywood repeatedly came courting, but he put off offers for nearly a decade, even turning down roles in classic films like East of Eden and Sunset Boulevard.
At the age of 25, Clift finally moved to Hollywood. His first movie role was opposite John Wayne in Red River (1948).
When director Peter Bogdanovich needed a movie to play as the final feature in the doomed small-town theatre in his film The Last Picture Show, he chose Howard Hawks’ Red River. He selected the scene where John Wayne tells Clift, “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt!” And then there is Hawks’ famous montage of weathered cowboy faces in close up and exaltation, as they cry “Hee-yaw!” and wave their hats in the air.
Red River is one of the greatest of all Westerns when it stays with its central story about an older man (John Wayne) and a younger one (Clift), and the first cattle drive down the Chisholm Trail. Between Wayne and Clift there is a clear tension, not only between an older man and a younger one, but also between an actor who started in 1929 and another who represented the leading edge of the Method.
Clift’s second movie was The Search. The 1948 Swiss-American film directed by Fred Zinnemann, tells the story of a young Auschwitz survivor and his mother who search for each other across post-World War II Europe.
Clift was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
In order to avoid being typecast, Clift signed on for his next movie, 1949’s The Heiress. The film is about a young naive woman who falls in love with a handsome young man, despite the objections of her emotionally abusive father who suspects the man of being a fortune hunter. The Heiress received universal critical acclaim and won four Academy Awards.
Clift’s performance in 1951’s A Place in the Sun is regarded as one of his signature method acting performances. He worked extensively on his character, and was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
The film tells the story of a working-class young man who is entangled with two women: one who works in his wealthy uncle’s factory, and the other a beautiful socialite.
The film was directed by George Stevens and stars Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. It was a critical and commercial success, winning six Academy Awards and the first-ever Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.
The film received added media attention due to the rumours that Clift and co-star Taylor were dating in real life.
After an almost two-year break, in the summer of 1952, Clift committed himself to three more films: I Confess, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock; Vittorio De Sica’s Terminal Station; and Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity.
From Here to Eternity was based on the novel by James Jones. The picture deals with the tribulations of three U.S. Army soldiers, played by Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra and Clift stationed on Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbour. Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed portray the women in their lives.
The film won eight Academy Awards out of 13 nominations, including awards for Best Picture.
On the evening of May 12, 1956, while filming Raintree County, Clift was involved in a serious auto accident when he apparently fell asleep while driving and smashed his car into a telephone pole minutes after leaving a dinner party at the Beverly Hills home of Elizabeth Taylor, and her second husband, Michael Wilding. He suffered a broken jaw and nose, a fractured sinus, and several facial lacerations, which required plastic surgery.
After a two-month recovery, Clift returned to the set to finish the film. Despite the studio’s concerns over profits, Clift correctly predicted the film would do well, if only because moviegoers would flock to see the difference in his facial appearance before and after the accident. Although the results of Clift’s plastic surgeries were remarkable for the time, there were noticeable differences in his facial appearance, particularly the left side of his face, which was nearly immobile. As a result, Clift’s health and physical appearance deteriorated considerably from then until his death.
Clift never physically or emotionally recovered from his car accident. His post-accident career has been referred to as the “longest suicide in Hollywood history” by acting teacher Robert Lewis because of Clift’s subsequent abuse of painkillers and alcohol. He began to behave erratically in public, which embarrassed his friends. Nevertheless, Clift continued to work over the next ten years. His next three films were The Young Lions (1958), Lonelyhearts (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
In 1959 Clift turned down what became Dean Martin’s role as “Dude” in Rio Bravo, which would have reunited him with his co-stars from Red River, John Wayne and Walter Brennan, as well as with Howard Hawks, the director of both films.
Clift then co-starred in John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), which was the final film of both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable.
The film was a commercial failure at the time of its release, but received positive critical comments for its script and performances, and is highly regarded today.
Despite on – set difficulties, Gable, Monroe and Clift delivered performances that modern critics consider superb.
His last two movies, the John Huston-directed “Freud,” and the forgotten “The Defector,” were not memorable or well received. But just prior to those two films, even in his shattered state, Clift had one last moment of greatness. A heart-breaking moment of beauty.

The movie was “Judgment At Nuremberg” (1961), which tells the story of one of the trials that were held in Germany after World War II to prosecute Third Reich officials for war crimes. Clift played a mentally challenged young man named Rudolph Petersen, a survivor of a concentration camp who was sterilized by Nazi doctors.
This was Clift’s last nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a 12-minute supporting part – 12 minutes of acting genius.
He was set to play in Elizabeth Taylor’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), when he died on the early morning hours of July 23, 1966 at his home at age 45. His body was found by his live – in personal secretary/companion Lorenzo James who found Clift lying on top of his bed, dead from what the autopsy called “occlusive coronary artery disease.”
Following a 15-minute funeral at St. James’ Church attended by 150 guests, including Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy Walker, Clift was buried in the Friends [Quaker] Cemetery, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City.

Extract from Who the Hell’s in it? by Peter Bogdanovich

Filmmaker and writer Peter Bogdanovich recalls meeting the actor Montgomery Clift four years after Clift had been involved in a car accident, which left him partially disfigured.
A Rolls Silver Cloud pulled up in front of the New Yorker movie theater one afternoon around four, and a tall, stately woman got out, followed by a thin, frail man whom I immediately recognized as Montgomery Clift. As though in somewhat of a trance, the two of them – the lady, we found out later, was Mrs. Walter Huston – made their way into the theater, where we were running a couple of Hitchcock pictures. One of them was I Confess (1953), starring Clift, and I guess that was the reason they had come all the way up to 89th Street and Broadway that grey spring day in 1961.
…Here it was about eight years after Clift had acted in it, and I Confess was on the screen; I was standing at the back of the theater watching. About halfway through, I saw Clift come up the aisle, slumped over, weaving a little. At the back, he lit a cigarette and turned to look at the screen again. I came up and said I worked there. He was polite. I said I liked the picture and asked if he did.
The huge image on the screen at that moment of his pre-accident beauty must have seemed to mock him. He turned away and looked at me sadly. “It’s…hard, you know.” He said it slowly, hesitantly, a little slurred. “It’s very…hard,” he said. I nodded. He looked back at the screen.
A few steps away was a “request book” Talbot (the cinema owner) had set up for his patrons. It was a large lined ledger in which audiences were encouraged (by sign and trailer) to write down what movies they would like to see. I told Clift about the book and said I wanted to show him something. He followed me over, puffing his cigarette absently. I leafed through the book quickly and found the page on which I had noticed a couple of days before that someone had scrawled in large red letters: “ANYTHING WITH MONTGOMERY CLIFT!”
The actor stared at the page for several moments. “That’s very…nice,” he said, and continued to look down. ”That’s…very nice’” he said again, and I realized he was crying. He put his arm around me unsteadily and thanked me for showing it to him. Then he turned and walked back down the aisle to his seat.
When the picture was over, he and Mrs. Huston came out of the theater. I was standing outside. He waved to me gently and they got back in the Rolls-Royce and it was driven away. He made only two films more before he died five years later at the age of forty-six – a lost poet from Omaha, Nebraska, the most romantic and touching actor of his generation.

Top 10 Films

The Search (1948)
Director: Fred Zinnemann

Red River (1948)
Director: Howard Hawks

The Heiress (1949)
Director: William Wyler

A Place in the Sun (1951)
Director: George Stevens

I Confess (1953)
Directors: Alfred Hitchcock

From Here to Eternity (1953)
Director: Fred Zinnemann

The Young Lions (1958)
Director: Edward Dmytryk

Wild River (1960)
Director: Elia Kazan

The Misfits (1961)
Director: John Huston

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Director: Stanley Kramer

Image: John Wayne and Clift from Red River

Source: wikipedia, www.vanityfair.com, www.bfi.org.uk, www.rogerebert.com, www.theguardian.com and www.cmgww.com