Lancaster, Burt(on) Stephen

(b. 2 November 1913 in New York City; d. 20 October 1994 in Los Angeles, California), movie actor and one of the most successful independent star-producers of the post—World War II Hollywood era.

Lancaster was born in the family house on East 106th Street in the politically progressive, immigrant neighborhood of New York’s East Harlem. He was the fourth and final child of James Lancaster, a postal worker, and Lizzie Lancaster, both second-generation Northern Ireland Protestants. A pugnacious scrapper as a child, Lancaster nevertheless loved to read. He dreamed of being a famous opera singer and performed in many amateur theatrical productions at the local Union Settlement Association. When, as a teenager, he shot up to his full adult height of 6 feet two inches, he came into his own as a handsome, graceful athlete.

An injury prevented Lancaster from starting college immediately after his graduation from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1930. Before entering New York University’s School of Education in the fall of 1931, he developed a passion for acrobatics and started to perfect a parallel bar act in the gym of the local Union Settlement Association with his neighborhood pal, Nick Cuccia (later called Nick Cravat).

In the spring of 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression, the two young men left East Harlem to join the Kay Brothers Circus as acrobats. Thus began Lancaster’s key exposure to and training in the American circus and in vaudeville that lasted until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. He and Cravat crisscrossed the country as part of a string of small “mud show” circus troupes and learned the hard craft and vigorous routine of live circus entertainment. In 1935 Lancaster married June Ernst, of a well-known family of circus aerialists; the relationship lasted barely two years. By the end of the decade, after two years (1935–1937) in the WPA Circus of the Federal Theater Project in New York, Lancaster was reduced to burlesque and vaudeville routines and quit the entertainment field in 1941 to work in Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store as a salesman.

Lancaster served in Italy from 1942 to 1945 in the Twenty-first Special Service Division, a branch of the armed forces created to provide entertainment to the troops. Following General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army up the Italian boot, he gained not only key exposure to seasoned theatrical performers but also a chance to observe American military attitudes and characters that would later provide essential background for some of his key postwar roles in such movies as From Here to Eternity (1953). He also met Norma Anderson, a USO performer from Wisconsin whom he would marry on 28 December 1946 and who would be the mother of all of his five children.

In September 1945 Lancaster arrived back in New York City and was immediately cast as a sergeant in Harry Brown’s new “dugout drama,” A Sound of Hunting. His serendipitous luck in being cast in a Broadway play, the immediate contract bids that streamed in from all the major Hollywood studios, his signing with Hal Wallis of Paramount Studios with an unusual outside option, his quick capitalizing on the option with independent Universal producer Mark Hellinger to appear in a movie version of the famous Ernest Hemingway short story “The Killers”—all these factors created one of the most famous star discovery stories in Hollywood history. Without ever having appeared in a major theatrical or movie production in his life, at the age of thirty-three in 1946, Lancaster was a star and remained so for the rest of his life.

The years from 1946 to 1960 were Lancaster’s zenith years. One of the megastars of Hollywood, famous around the world for his blond hair, blazing blue eyes, chiseled white teeth, and physical power and grace, he was also a primary force in the explosively changing postwar movie industry. In 1947 he and his partner, Harold Hecht, formed Norma Productions (named for Lancaster’s wife), an independent production company. As Hecht Lancaster and, from 1957, Hecht Hill Lancaster, the company allied with United Artists to become one of the most successful “indies” of the decade. In breakthrough pictures like Marty (1955), which was the first American film to win best picture at the Cannes Film Festival, Apache (1954), Trapeze (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and Separate Tables (1958), the company charted the course from the old Hollywood of studio vertical domination to the new world of star-driven independent production.

Using the international stardom earned through a remarkable range of movie choices, Lancaster crafted a balance of commercial and “art” films that he maintained throughout his screen life. Up until 1960, when his independent company dissolved itself, he alternated between contracts with his original studio, Paramount Sorry, Wrong Number [1948], The Rainmaker [1956], Gunfight at the O.K. Corral [1957]); with Warner Bros. The Flame and the Arrow [1950], The Crimson Pirate [1952], Jim Thorpe —All American [1951]); and with Columbia From Here to Eternity, for which he won his first Oscar nomination). Under the safer commercial umbrella of Paramount, he played some of the most ambitious early “stretch” parts through which he learned the craft of acting, including Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and The Rose Tattoo (1955).

By the time Lancaster made Elmer Gantry (1960) with director Richard Brooks and won his first Academy Award, for his portrayal of the slick, huckster evangelist from Sinclair Lewis’s 1920s novel, he was independent of any studio. He proceeded to make some of the movies for which he is most vividly remembered, deepening with each challenging role his redefinition of the popular idea of the movie star as a consistent persona. Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), for which he won his third Oscar nomination in the title role, reinforced in the public’s mind Lancaster’s reputation for making hard-hitting pictures cued to key issues of his time—in this case, prison reform. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) vividly revived the memory of the Nazi Holocaust when the cold war had swept the memory out of public consciousness. For Luchino Visconti, Lancaster made The Leopard (1963), a lavish chronicle tracing the post-Garibaldi end of the Italian aristocracy in Lancaster’s character, the Sicilian Prince of Salina. For John Frankenheimer, a director with whom he worked frequently in this era, Lancaster and frequent costar Kirk Douglas made Seven Days in May (1964), a cold war melodrama about a military attempt to take over the U.S. government, a movie made with the active cooperation of President John F. Kennedy and released shortly after his assassination.

Throughout these years, Lancaster worked hard to maintain some semblance of a normal family life. His wife and children routinely came on foreign locations with him up until the late 1950s. At the same time, he was well known for engaging in extramarital love affairs with costars such as Yvonne De Carlo, Deborah Kerr, and Katy Jurado; in the late 1940s he had a longer, more serious relationship with Shelley Winters. In 1969 Lancaster and Norma divorced; in 1964 he had begun a relationship with a movie hairdresser, Jackie Bone, that lasted almost twenty years. In his own fashion, Lancaster valued loyalty and maintained his old business partner, Nick Cravat, on his payroll for the rest of his life. His involvement with progressive political causes began with his active opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, continued with his quiet hiring and supporting of gray-and black-listed movie professionals such as Waldo Salt in the 1950s, and found mature expression from the 1960s on in such issues as civil rights, First Amendment rights, and, generally, in giving the disenfranchised equal access to mainstream American life. His was a complicated, fractious personality that mellowed as he got older. “Somewhere it has got to stop,” he once said. “You’ve got to put down the sword.”

The last third of Lancaster’s life was marked by remarkable but overlooked performances in such films as The Swimmer (1968), Ulzana’s Raid with director Robert Aldrich (1972), Visconti’s Conversation Piece (1975), 7900 for Bernardo Bertolucci (1976), and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) for Robert Alt-man. But with Atlantic City (1981), directed by Louis Malle, Lancaster not only received his fourth Oscar nomination but the “comeback” recognition that, finally, he was a great actor.

With the physique and discipline of an athlete, Lancaster kept himself in play for decades. As he matured, his onscreen acting style became more contained but no less graceful. His body remained his instrument of style. The agile body that had been his trademark began to break down in the 1980s. After a quadruple heart bypass operation in 1983, he had to turn down a string of worthy parts (Gorky Park, Kiss of the Spider Woman) that would not come his way again. Nevertheless, he savored the chance to play thoughtful character roles in Local Hero (1983) and Rocket Gibraltar (1988). On 10 September 1990 he married Susie Martin, an actress and script supervisor he had met in 1984. Lancaster’s last movie role was as Doc Graham in Field of Dreams (1989). His final piece of work was in Separate but Equal, the 1991 Emmy Award—winning ABC-TV multiseries about the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision. In late 1990 Lancaster suffered a debilitating stroke, and four years later he died of a heart attack at the age of eighty in his home at Century City in Los Angeles. He is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles.

In a pivotal, transitional time in Hollywood—the 1950s—Lancaster challenged the industry’s and the public’s assumptions about movie stars. A true maverick of the movie business, he insisted his films match the tenor of his time. Moreover, he used his power as a star to set up and sustain an independent production company that similarly redefined the parameters of the movie business in one of its most chaotic decades. Lancaster is remembered by millions for a charismatic, disciplined energy on the screen and an expressive mastery of screen language that harks back to cinema’s beginnings on the silent screen.

Lancaster’s personal collection of the bound scripts of his movies is at the School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Material related to his film career can be found at USC; the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; and the Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York City. The most recent and complete biography, written with the cooperation of Lancaster’s widow, is Kate Buford, Bun Lancaster: An American Life (2000). The only significant retrospective periodical article is also by Buford: “Lancaster: Dance with the Leopard,” Film Comment (Jan.–Feb. 1993). An obituary is in the New York Times (22 Oct. 1994).

Kate Buford