Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis’s role in the account of Some Like It Hot is defined by a widening split between his private contempt for Marilyn Monroe and the screen partnership their work requires. Proud of his career and determined to keep a part he expects to be both prestigious and lucrative, he resents the delays and disruptions he attributes to Monroe. The film’s production repeatedly tests that resentment—and finally unsettles it with a performance he cannot explain away.

Identity and Position in the Production

Curtis is presented as a handsome, ambitious actor, confident in the value of his career and protective of its prospects. The narrative emphasizes that even in a woman’s costume in Some Like It Hot he remains strikingly handsome rather than becoming a comic grotesque. That appearance draws women’s eyes, while his on-set relationship with Monroe is increasingly defined by aversion. He has too much invested in the film to abandon it: the role seems to him a rare opportunity, one that could become his best film and earn him substantial money.

His position is therefore double-edged. Curtis is not merely a bystander to Monroe’s behavior; he is her scene partner, required to sustain fictional intimacy while feeling that the production and his own performance are being damaged. He believes the director, Billy Wilder, will favor Monroe in the final edit because she is the film’s principal attraction. The prospect makes her fame feel, to Curtis, like a professional power that can eclipse his work even when he believes he is the more reliable member of the production.

From Early Ease to Hostility

The relationship does not begin in open antagonism. During preproduction, Curtis and Monroe joke together about the many love scenes they will have to perform. One planned scene places them aboard a yacht: Curtis lies on a couch pretending to be impotent while Sugar Kane, Monroe’s character, bends over him to kiss and tease him as if trying to cure him. Its sexual implications are to pass censorship under the cover of farce. In those early meetings, Curtis appreciates Monroe and has no idea of the ordeal he expects the shoot to become.

As filming proceeds, that ease gives way to resentment. Curtis and the crew often wait hours for Monroe to arrive; days scheduled to begin at ten in the morning may not get underway until four, or even six in the evening. A relatively simple scene takes sixty-five takes. Curtis, ambitious and proud of his career, sees the repeated delays as an injury to his own work and refuses to let Monroe’s difficulties become his problem. The narration acknowledges the circumstances surrounding her—she has lost a child and her marriage is collapsing—but Curtis does not allow that knowledge to soften his response. He is focused on his role, his time, and the possibility that the film’s final form will give the star priority over him.

His contempt becomes personal and theatrical. He imitates Monroe’s confused, disjointed manner of speaking and tells stories at her expense. The account also describes a kiss in which Curtis’s mouth tastes of bitter almonds: Monroe recoils and runs from the set, accusing him of putting poison on his lips. The episode is presented as something people would say about the incident, not as an independently established explanation of what happened. In the narrative’s account of their relationship, however, the story captures how far intimacy on screen has become entangled with suspicion and hostility off screen.

The Scene That Changes the Balance

The yacht sequence becomes a test of the very judgment Curtis has formed. On one particular day Monroe arrives only four hours late. Wilder has used the delay to film scenes that do not require her, recovering some of the lost time. Monroe comes onto the set breathless and contrite, apologizing and asking especially for Curtis’s forgiveness. When she takes his hands, they are so cold that he shivers.

Then the performance begins. Monroe moves through four or five pages of script without a hesitation, accomplishing almost the whole long, difficult, intimate love scene. The staging requires repeated kisses, and Sugar Kane appears in a very short, low-cut, semitransparent dress, a sensual comic figure draped over Curtis. Although the actors dislike each other, the scene runs smoothly and convincingly. Curtis expects Monroe to ask to do it again. Instead, she smiles, and the scene remains intact as a single take.

The contrast is difficult for him to dismiss: after weeks of waiting and wasted repetitions, the performance he had reason to distrust is completed at once. Curtis wonders whether Monroe has suddenly recovered from an illness or whether she has simply chosen to prove that she can do it when she wants to. The uncertainty matters. The scene does not reconcile them, but it complicates the story Curtis tells himself about her incapacity. Her lateness and the production’s frustration remain real within the account; so does the evidence of concentrated skill that the camera captures.

Screen Partnership and Lasting Conflict

Curtis’s later account of the production preserves the antagonism rather than resolving it. He would remain Monroe’s enemy, and after her death he would tell sordid stories about her. At the same time, the film’s director offers a sharply different measure of their collaboration: in life, Monroe was difficult, while on screen she was divine, with no connection between the two. That distinction gives Curtis’s conflict its central irony. He encounters the offscreen delays and disorder, but the finished performance can exceed the resentment through which he understands them.

The narrative also places Curtis’s experience beside Monroe’s unstable division between performer and person. In a private scene with her husband, her thoughts turn to the next day’s love scene with Curtis: the audience must believe in Sugar Kane’s passion even though Curtis, in life, has come to despise her. The work demands believable intimacy from two actors whose relationship has become antagonistic. Curtis’s part in that contradiction is not simply that he dislikes Monroe; it is that his own professional ambition requires him to keep acting opposite her, while her screen presence remains powerful enough to make their conflict disappear from the scene itself.