First published: 2000

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 447 pp. $27.50

Type of work: Biography

Time of work: 1913-1994

Locale: New York, California, Italy, and elsewhere

A scholarly study of a major motion picture star who also pioneered independent production and started the transition between studio control and modern filmmaking

Despite winning an Academy Award for Elmer Gantry (1960) and receiving three other Oscar nominations, Burt Lancaster has not always received appropriate recognition for his acting and other contributions to film. Perhaps the reason is that many of his popular films were bravura entertainments, while the “art films” that he liked to alternate with them were undervalued in their day, though discerning critics and film enthusiasts have subsequently discovered their merit. Having started his career with tough roles in The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947), and other noirish films, and having later made numerous Westerns, Lancaster got a reputation for toughness (actor-filmmaker John Turturro wrote a film in which the lead character shouts that no one messes around with Burt Lancaster), for his unruly hair, for being “Mr. Muscles and Teeth.” As Lancaster wryly observed, “Most people . . . seem to think I’m the kind of guy who shaves with a blowtorch. Actually I’m inclined to be bookish and worrisome.”

Lancaster was a complex, often troubled man. Born of Irish ancestry in 1913, he grew up in East Harlem, a poor, working-class neighborhood of mostly Italian immigrants. He attended the best high school in the city; while at the Union Settlement House, his refuge from the streets, he took up boxing and acted in many amateur productions, but turned down a scholarship to the American Laboratory Theater. Instead, he worked during the Depression as an acrobat in a number of itinerant circuses and vaudeville shows. Drafted during World War II, he was assigned to Army Service Forces, a new unit that entertained the troops; he served with the unit all through the Italian campaign, often under fire. Back home, a talent scout saw him, still in uniform, thought him strikingly handsome, and cast him as one of the leads in a dugout drama, A Sound of Hunting, which ran only two weeks but led to a Hollywood contract and the male lead as the target of the hit men in The Killers, based on Ernest Hemingway’s story. Lancaster’s riveting performance made him an instant star. Within a year he teamed up with Harold Hecht to found his own independent production company, Norma Productions, named for his second wife. Evolving into Hecht-Lancaster and then Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, it became the major independent studio of the era, producing not only many of Lancaster’s films but also Marty, the low-budget Oscar winner of 1955.

Lancaster married three times. During the circus years he was married to acrobat June Ernst. At the end of the war he married Norma Anderson (the mother of his five children), an intelligent, witty woman who was also a hopeless alcoholic. Though Lancaster had numerous affairs, including ones with Shelley Winters, Marlene Dietrich, and Deborah Kerr, he and Norma remained married for twenty-five years. In his old age he married Susie Martin.

A very private person, Lancaster was hard to get to know (even by Kirk Douglas, with whom he did six films and a stage play). However, he was intensely loyal to his friends, such as Nick Cravat, his diminutive circus partner, whom he cast in many of his films, and with whom he remained close all their lives. He was vulnerable to depression and could break out into terrifying rages, but could also be warm, generous, and charming. His associates considered him fearless. Though he dropped out of New York University after a brief stint, he was an autodidact—an omnivorous reader of history and philosophy as well as literature, and such a zealous devotee of opera and other classical music that he became a member of the board of the Los Angeles Opera. He was so dedicated to filmmaking that he taught himself every detail of the craft. Often he worked on the script and had a hand in the direction, and he directed two films himself. A self-made intellectual, he was as much concerned with the art of his films as with the nuts and bolts of making them.

From his childhood in an immigrant neighborhood and his attendance at East Harlem’s Union Settlement House, with its social gospel, Lancaster was a concerned citizen who believed that all people should be treated as equals, and he actively championed the underdog. Unlike onetime liberals such as Frank Sinatra and Charlton Heston, who made a sharp turn to the right, Lancaster remained so generously committed to progressive causes that he earned a place on Richard Nixon’s “enemies” list. During the dark days of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings, McCarthyism, and the blacklist, Lancaster stood up for the First Amendment. Despite attacks from the far right, he had never been a communist and managed to evade the blacklist. Among actors involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, Lancaster was called the most sensitive, the most truly committed. Later he campaigned for Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’s first black mayor. He was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation executive committee, and when George Bush characterized the ACLU as un-American during his 1988 campaign, Lancaster appeared in the organization’s first television ads, proudly announcing himself as “a card-carrying member.” He supported television producer Norman Lear’s People for the American Way against the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and was named “Man of the Year” for supporting Aid for AIDS.

Unlike stars such as John Wayne who found a persona and largely stuck with it (Wayne said after making Red River in 1948 that he had found a role he could play for the next thirty years), Lancaster, while still in his thirties, sought out character roles such as the aging alcoholic Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and a wild Sicilian immigrant in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1955). In an interview he urged his audiences to bear with him while he tried to extend his range by doing the unexpected, making films with provocative themes and artistic complexities. Though film critic Pauline Kael called him “hunkus Americanus,” she came to appreciate his taking chances throughout the evolution of his career. Starting out playing grim-faced criminals, he suddenly became the grinning hero of several swashbucklers, then did a vast variety of characters—an Apache warrior (Apache, 1954), a vitriolic columnist (Sweet Smell of Success, 1957), an eighteenth century clergyman (The Devil’s Disciple, 1959, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play), a charismatic but rascally evangelist (Elmer Gantry), a Nazi jurist (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961), a prisoner (Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962), a nineteenth century Sicilian prince (The Leopard, 1963), a right-wing general planning a military coup (Seven Days in May, 1964), a French Resistance fighter (The Train, 1964), a Mexican constable (Valdez Is Coming, 1971), a grizzled army scout (Ulzana’s Raid, 1972), an Italian patriarch (1900 [Novecento], 1977). He worked not only with top American directors but also with Italian filmmakers Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci. On television, he was Moses, a medieval pope, a seventeenth century Italian cardinal, P. T. Barnum, an aging Jewish tourist recovering from a stroke who is murdered by Palestinian terrorists, a segregationist lawyer, and the father of the Phantom of the Opera. He returned to the stage to sing and dance (with a wooden leg) as Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of seventeenth century New York, and as a middle-aged Huckleberry Finn opposite Kirk Douglas’s Tom Sawyer.

An intelligent, sensitive actor, Lancaster also used the remarkable strength of his athletic body to move with a leonine grace. Actress Amanda Plummer commented that “he understood time on film, movement and space on film. How to move and how to work in harmony with the camera so that it wasn’t actor-y. He . . . could do anything with his body.” In The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952), he used his circus skills to do the most spectacular acrobatics of any actor in films, surpassing his boyhood idol Douglas Fairbanks. At the age of thirty-seven he re-created all the exploits of the legendary Native American athlete in Jim Thorpe—All American (1951). As he aged gracefully, Lancaster’s deliberate moves reflected the stiffness, aches, and pains of the older characters he portrayed. For his subtly nuanced performance as an aging would-be gangster in Atlantic City (1981), he earned a fourth Oscar nomination, and Buford thinks he would have won had not Jane Fonda lobbied so hard for her father, who received the award that year for his final role in On Golden Pond.

Also notable are the roles that Lancaster missed getting or turned down. He was first considered for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) but lost out to Marlon Brando, who had done the role on stage; he turned down Dirty Harry (1972) because he disapproved of its vigilante morality, and he declined Patton (1970), the film that reputedly encouraged Richard Nixon to bomb Cambodia. He desperately wanted to play Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972), claiming that from his boyhood among immigrant Italians he knew such people intimately, and indeed he might have been better than Brando. He was set to play the imprisoned gay hairdresser in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) but had to relinquish it after having quadruple-bypass heart surgery. Originally set to play Ambrose Bierce in Old Gringo (1989), he was replaced by Gregory Peck because his health made him no longer insurable. After a lifetime of extraordinary demands on his physique, while he smoked and paid no attention to diet, Lancaster saw his body begin to break down in his late sixties. Still, he kept on acting until late 1989, when he was incapacitated by a massive stroke. For over four years he survived, in a wheelchair, unable to read, his speech slurred, but finding consolation in music and the loving care of his wife.

All too often biographies of film stars are superficial or distorted, like extended articles for People magazine or for the tabloids, some of the “research” consisting of unverified hearsay. However, serious film artists deserve the same sort of scholarship as any other significant historical figures. Buford’s life of Lancaster is a richly textured work of solid scholarship, with exactly one hundred pages of annotation, extensive bibliography, and a complete filmography of the seventy-two feature films in which he acted, the seven films that he produced without being in the cast, his thirteen television films and miniseries, and his three stage plays. At the same time, Burt Lancaster is immensely readable in style and content. Buford’s subtitle An American Life is justified in that she re-creates in vivid detail the eras and environments in which Lancaster lived and worked, from his boyhood in East Harlem through his circus years, the war years and postwar Hollywood witch-hunts by HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the civil rights movement, and the changes in filmmaking during Lancaster’s forty-four years as an actor, producer, and director. Besides historical and biographical detail, she provides perceptive in-depth analysis of the making and artistry of Lancaster’s major films, and is particularly good on his more complex and controversial ones such as Birdman of Alcatraz, The Leopard, The Swimmer (1968), Ulzana’s Raid, and Go Tell the Spartans (1978). Written in a literary but unacademic style, Buford’s compelling, well-illustrated portrait of Lancaster’s life and times is a model biography of a major film star.

Sources for Further Study