Financial Times (London,England)
October 22, 1994, Saturday
Burt Lancaster: good guy – Obituary
By Stephen Amidon
Burt Lancaster, who died in Los Angeles yesterday at the age of 80, was one of the most varied and skillful male leads Hollywood has ever produced.His ruggedly-handsome face and chiselled physique allowed him to achieve stardom in the beefed-up, superficial American cinema of the 1950s, a time when pectorals seemed more in demand than talent. But though Lancaster was certainly never lacking in the muscle department, he did manage to pack nearly every performance with emotional depth and great intelligence. It was this skill that eventually allowed him to work well into his eighth decade, long past the time that most of his contemporaries had been put out to stud.
Born the son of a postal clerk in 1913, Burton Stephen Lancaster grew up on the mean streets of Harlem, using his prodigious physical skills to earn a sports scholarship at university and then to win a job on a vaudeville acrobatic team. Never truly successful on the hard-knocks variety circuit, Lancaster worked at various menial jobs to make ends meet, and when the second world war came along he was only too eager to give up acrobatics for a stint as a special forces operative in the US army. Upon returning to civilian life he took up screen acting, striking gold with an astonishing debut performance as Swede in the 1946 noir classic, The Killers. After years of nervy little tough guys like Bogart and Cagney, the war-weary public seemed ready for this calmly regal star.Although the next few years saw several ‘heavy’ roles in forgettable B-films such as Brute Force and Kiss the Blood off my Hands, Lancaster soon abandoned macho-heroics for more varied parts. Most memorable of these were his work as a creepy, incestuous gossip columnist in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and the lovelorn sergeant warden in From Here to Eternity (1953). This latter film raised Lancaster to icon status for his steamy beach grapple with Deborah Kerr.
During this period, Lancaster also had the wisdom to opt out of the studio grind, forming his own production company with agent Henry Hecht. In this capacity he was to produce several notable films, including the academy-award winning Marty (1955).
Lancaster won his sole acting Oscar in 1960 for his powerful portrayal of a conman evangelist in Elmer Gantry, a film which completed his transition from celluloid hunk to thinking actor. Subsequent performances in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) established him as the premier male lead of the early 1960s, an actor who could satisfy the public’s desire for rugged good looks while at the same time pleasing the critics. Lancaster’s most mature performance came when he took on the challenge of portraying the wistful Sicilian prince in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963). Several commentators had ranked this as one of the greatest acting turns of all time.
The next 10 years were perhaps more notable for the roles Lancaster turned down than for those he accepted. He rejected the lead in Patten to earn his rent in Airport, a film he publicly judged to be ‘junk’. Even more amazingly, he also refused to be considered for the title role in The Godfather. For the first time in his career, Lancaster had lost his nose for the right move. Like his contemporaries Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, he seemed destined to become another wrinkling superstar condemned to cameo hell. Remarkably, however, he managed to stage a comeback as he approached his 70th year with his deeply-felt portrayal of an ageing Mafia hood in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980). Three years later he was to score again as the melancholy oil billionaire in Bill Forsythe’s magical Local Hero. Indeed, Lancaster’s performance in Field of Dreams (1989) as an aged baseball player who gets another chance to play served as a fitting coda for an actor who was able to keep on having his turns at the plate.
One of the hallmarks of Lancaster’s professionalism and generosity as an actor was his unrivalled record of providing co-stars with Oscars, from Shirley Booth to Anna Magnani, from Frank Sinatra to David Niven.
His own four nominations spanned 30 years, from From Here to Eternity to Atlantic City – the fact that he lost out for that latter film to a feeble Henry Fonda can be put down to Hollywood’s indulgence for maudlin sentiment. Not that it matters. While most actors would be happy to seem ageless as they hit the twilight years, it was Burt Lancaster’s special grace always to seem full of the ages.
