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Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in The Bronx, New York City in 1925, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He had a crappy childhood, and in WWII he served in the Navy. He got out in 1945 when the war ended, and went to acting school, and he was signed to a contract at Universal in 1948, where he changed his name to Anthony Curtis. His first movie was a tiny one in Cross Cross, but it was notable because that movie starred Burt Lancaster, with whom Curtis would later co-star in two very memorable movies. In 1951 he married Janet Leigh (he later admitted he primarily married her to advance his career), and in 1953 they co-starred in Houdini together. In 1956 he co-starred with Lancaster and Lollabrigida in Trapeze, and the following year he co-starred with Lancaster in Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. In 1958 he was memorable in The Defiant Ones (nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for this film) opposite Sidney Poitier. In 1959 he had his best role ever, as the cross-dressing star of Some Like It Hot. In 1960 he took a supporting role in Spartacus. In 1968, with his career fading, he took the lead role of Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler. But it did not do much to revive his career and over the next 40+ years he made many lesser movies and had many appearances on TV shows. In his later years, he pursued art, and had a successful business selling his artwork, no doubt many of them to fans who wanted a "Tony Curtis original". He passed away in 2010 at the age of 85. Curtis had six wives, and six children, the best known being actress Jamie Lee Curtis. He had well documented troubles with his families, and with drugs. Tony Curtis was in many of the most memorable films of the 1950s and 1960s, and even his lesser movies of that period are pretty entertaining. Perhaps his best move was his willingness to take secondary roles to other great actors, even though he could have solely played leading roles. I highly recommend seeing all of the movies noted above!

Important Added Info: Note that this is a "studio-issued" negative. What is it? It was produced by the studio but is not the camera original. It is very high quality and was created in quantity by the studios and sent to media outlets or other places that had need of the very highest quality image for reproduction purposes (in newspapers, magazines, or elsewhere). We have put an image of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to a scan of the negative image). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). The negative is in a plastic sleeve (but we removed it and scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is). It will be sent to the winner of the auction in its sleeve.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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