Acting
Montgomery Clift
Edward Montgomery “Monty” Clift (October 17, 1920 - July 23, 1966) was an American actor of the Golden Age, known for often playing sensitive or conflicted outcast characters with realistic emotional depth and anxieties.
Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean are the trio typically associated with the new wave of film acting, with Clift being the oldest and first to make his stage and screen debuts. Starting at age 14, he was a breakout talent on Broadway throughout 1935-1945. He finally accepted one of many Hollywood offers: starring in the Western “Red River” which was filmed in 1946 but delayed release for 2 years. Fred Zinnemann’s “The Search” preceded “Red River” as his first film in 1948 and first Academy Award nomination. Clift’s next major films were “The Heiress” (1949) and “A Place in the Sun” (1951), cementing his romantic lead status. At the time, audiences had rarely seen a type of masculinity softened with Clift’s vulnerability. Hollywood had also never seen a young actor control his career and instant stardom the way Clift did in the late 1940’s: notoriously selective, refusing the standard seven-year studio contracts and rewriting scripts to preserve his artistic freedom. In 1953, Zinnemann again directed Clift to an Academy Award nomination in war drama “From Here to Eternity.”
After suffering a near-fatal car accident during “Raintree County” (1957) he starred in acclaimed 1960’s films "Wild River,” "The Misfits” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” for which he earned a fourth and final Academy Award nomination for his 12-minute scene. Despite a 4-year hiatus and mounting health problems, Clift was eager to make a comeback in "Reflections in a Golden Eye,” secured by the insurance and insistence of co-star Elizabeth Taylor, but he tragically died of a heart attack at the age of 45 just weeks before shooting began.
Filmography
Browse movies and TV shows featuring Montgomery Clift
What's My Line?
Four panelists must determine guests' occupations - and, in the case of famous guests, while blindfolded, their...
The Ed Sullivan Show
The Ed Sullivan Show is an American TV variety show that originally ran on CBS from Sunday June 20, 1948 to Sun...
Judgment at Nuremberg
In 1947, four German judges who served on the bench during the Nazi regime face a military tribunal to answer c...
The David Susskind Show
The David Susskind Show is an American television talk show hosted by David Susskind. The program began its exi...
The Misfits
While filing for a divorce, beautiful ex-stripper Roslyn Taber ends up meeting aging cowboy-turned-gambler Gay...
Suddenly, Last Summer
The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl sa...
Red River
Following the Civil War, headstrong rancher Thomas Dunson decides to lead a perilous cattle drive from Texas to...
A Place in the Sun
A young social climber wins the heart of a beautiful heiress but his former girlfriend's pregnancy stands in th...
From Here to Eternity
In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and s...
I Confess
When a priest hears a murderer’s confession, he becomes bound by his vow of silence—even as circumstantial evid...
The Heiress
In 1840s New York, the uneventful and boring days of the daughter of a wealthy doctor come to an end when she m...
The Young Lions
The lives of three young men, a German and two Americans, during WWII.
Wild River
A young bureaucrat for the Tennessee Valley Authority goes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam....
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender
A film scrapbook, images, phrases from our past, hiding their meanings behind veils. Let's lift those veils, on...
Raintree County
In 1859, idealist John Wickliff Shawnessey, a resident of Raintree County, Indiana, is distracted from his high...
The Search
In postwar Germany, a displaced Czech boy, separated from his family during wartime, is befriended by an Americ...
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
Newly discovered interviews with Elizabeth Taylor and unprecedented access to the star’s personal archive revea...
Freud: The Secret Passion
An examination of Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud's career when he began to treat patients diagnosed with h...
Indiscretion of an American Wife
While on vacation in Rome, married American Mary Forbes becomes entangled in an affair with an Italian man, Gio...
Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage
A study of Tennessee Williams's life and work as a whole, ranging from his youth in Mississippi and in St. Loui...
The Big Lift
The Berlin Air Lift from the point of view of two Air Force NCOs who navigate romance in a bombed out post WW2...
Marlon Brando: An Actor Named Desire
In his early days as an actor, Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was a shy young man with theatrical ambitions, like ma...
The Fabulous Allan Carr
Armed with a limitless Rolodex and a Benedict Canyon enclave with its own disco, Allan Carr threw the Hollywood...
Rat Pack
In the 1950s, a small group of artists monopolized the attention of the cameras and the public. Frank Sinatra,...
Listen to Me Marlon
With exclusive access to his extraordinary unseen and unheard personal archive including hundreds of hours of a...
Edith Head: The Paramount Years
A tribute to the legendary costume designer Edith Head during her years providing costumes for the films of Par...
The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks
A documentary filmography of Howard Hawks, including lengthy footage of Hawks himself discussing his films and...
Sir John Mills' Moving Memories
A film biography with a difference, Sir John Mills' Moving Memories charts the life of one of Britain's most di...
The Defector
An American scientist is sent by the CIA to East Germany to retrieve a secret microfilm from a Soviet scientist...
Hollywood Heaven: Tragic Lives, Tragic Deaths
Welcome behind the closed doors of a Hollywood that only a select few will ever get to see -- a Hollywood of tr...
Montgomery Clift
A documentary incorporating footage of Montgomery Clift’s most memorable films; interviews with family and frie...
Lonelyhearts
Burdened by a family secret, Adam White lands a job as a newspaper advice columnist. Little does he realize tha...
Making Montgomery Clift
Classic film star and queer icon Montgomery Clift’s legacy has long been a story of tragedy and self-destructio...
Montgomery Clift: The Hidden Star
One of Hollywood's brightest stars is eclipsed by drink, drugs and self-doubt.
Starring Sigmund Freud
Starring Sigmund Freud is a video memento for Sigmund Freud's little-known film career. Based on an essay John...