Lancaster, Burt (1913-1994)

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Lancaster, Burt (1913-1994)

Burt Lancaster was the first, and the biggest, of the new crop of post-World War II stars and the last great survivor of Hollywood's golden era. In a career that began late and lasted some 40 years, the former circus acrobat matured from handsome and famously smiling athletic hunk to dignified elder statesman, bowing neither to time nor changing fashion. In his early films there was an almost disturbing disjunction between the tough, grim, often doomed characters he played and his own extraordinary beauty, but over the years his screen image—uniquely for a major box-office star of the time—constantly shifted. Lancaster's formidable determination enabled him to outlast the studio system to whose demise, as the first major producer-star of the modern era, he contributed. He was also a complex and contradictory character who gave many indifferent performances in poor films, amidst his fine work.

Born on November 2, 1913, in New York's East Harlem district, he was the fourth child of a postal clerk. Undersized until his teens, Burton Stephen Lancaster quickly learned to use his fists and developed a love of sports. A more serious and solitary side of his nature responded avidly to books and music, but he dropped out of New York University, where he won an athletics scholarship, to work up an acrobatic act with his friend Nick Cravat.

The pair went on the road as low-paid circus performers during the Depression years, and in 1935 Lancaster married a circus aerialist, a relationship that lasted barely a year. Needful of a break, he joined the Federal Theater Project in New York before returning to circus life with Cravat. In 1939 injury forced him off the high wire and a succession of stopgap jobs followed, the first as a salesman at Marshall Fields.

In 1942 Lancaster worked as a singing waiter before shipping out overseas with the Fifth Army's Entertainment unit. During this time he met Norma Anderson, a war widow who became his second wife in December 1946, and the mother of his four children; they divorced in 1969. By then he was launched on an acting career which had begun with a role as a soldier in a Broadway play called The Sound of Hunting. This brought him an agent, Harold Hecht, and a Hollywood contract with producer Hal Wallis.

While waiting to start work for Wallis, Lancaster, a self-proclaimed Hemingway aficionado, talked his way into the part of Swede in The Killers (1946). He was already 32 years old, unknown and inexperienced but, co-starred with another newcomer, Ava Gardner, and directed by a master of film noir, Robert Siodmak, he enjoyed instant success and rapidly became bankable, particularly in noir material. Among the best were Jules Dassin's powerful prison drama Brute Force (1947), in which the actor showed himself a leader of men and demonstrated his unique ability to convey suppressed rage simmering beneath a silent and stoical surface.

Having been forced into some poor films by Wallis, and in danger of being typecast in noir, Lancaster was seeking new directions. Thus, in 1950, he and Hecht, now business partners, sold a property to Warner Brothers, resulting in The Flame and the Arrow, a high-spirited swashbuckler in which Lancaster, with Nick Cravat as his pint-sized sidekick, unveiled his athletic skills with breathtaking zest and vigor. He did so again in The Crimson Pirate (1952), the year he tackled the role of Shirley Booth's alcoholic husband in Come Back, Little Sheba. From then on, across 77 films in 44 years, Lancaster alternated between safety and experimentation, failures both honorable and dishonorable, and high-level successes that have stood the test of time.

He gained new distinction and his first Oscar nomination for From Here to Eternity (1953) in which he notoriously cavorted on the beach with Deborah Kerr, and made an only partially successful foray into directing with The Kentuckian (1955). He took to the high wire again in Trapeze (1956) and, in 1957, expanded his Westerns filmography with Gunfight at the OK Corral. In Sweet Smell of Success (1957), he scored a notable acting success as the pathologically venomous newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker. It was his first performance for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, his own production partnership which allowed him to dive into the deep waters of his often troubled ambition and come up with winners in which he did not always appear, such as the now classic Marty (1955).

The 1960s began with Elmer Gantry, which won Lancaster the Best Actor Oscar for his devilish, barnstorming performance. In 1962 he was the Birdman of Alcatraz (another Academy nomination), and 1963 brought The Leopard for Luchino Visconti, which took him to Italy and elevated acclaim throughout Europe. These were the highlights of his middle age. He worked for Visconti again in Conversation Piece (1975), and for Bertolucci in 1900 (1976), but other than the now cult experiment The Swimmer (1968) and a handful of first-class performances in more predictable films, quality gave way to quantity.

Then, in 1981, aged 68, white-haired, mustachioed and digni-fied, he put the seal on his extraordinary career with Louis Malle's Atlantic City, playing a former petty crook, living on dreams and memories and wistfully pursuing a hopeless involvement with a young waitress. He earned several awards and a fourth Oscar nomination for a finely judged performance that is widely considered his most fully realized achievement.

Lancaster continued to work throughout the 1980s, concluding his career with a saintly cameo in Field of Dreams (1989). Although something of a loner in private life, he spoke publicly for liberal democratic values and worked for many causes, including AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) awareness, until his last years. Having recovered from a quadruple bypass operation in 1983, he suffered a stroke in December 1990. Permanently paralyzed on his right side, he remained confined to his apartment, a caged lion raging against his enforced inactivity, and cared for by his young third wife until his death on October 21, 1994.

Burt Lancaster transcended the limitations of his talent by the sheer weight and magnetism of his screen presence. As David Thomson wrote, "Brave, vigorous, handsome, and an actor of great range, Lancaster [has] never yielded in his immaculate splendor, proud to be a movie actor. And he has crept up on us, surviving, persisting, often in poor health. He [is] one of the great stars. Perhaps the last."

—Robyn Karney