Montgomery Clift - biography

“Look, I’m not odd.  I’m just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.”

“What do I have to do to prove I can act?”

“The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.”

“Liz is the only woman I have ever met who turns me on.  She feels like the other half of me.”

“Marilyn was an incredible person to act with, the most marvelous I ever worked with and I have been working for 29 years.”

“Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.”

“Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character.  It’s behavior -- it’s what’s going on behind the lines.”

“I don’t want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual.  Labeling is so self-limiting.  We are what we do, not what we say we are.”

“I feel my real talent lies in directing for my later years.”

“I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them.  What’s my mother going to tell strangers anyway?  That I was a cute baby and that she’s terribly proud of me?  Nuts.  Who cares?”

“I love the stage, but after a few months you can get tired.  I would rather do three movies than play in one stage hit.  I played in four flops in a row when I was about 17 and I was delighted.  I was being paid to be trained.”

“The only line that’s wrong in Shakespeare is ‘holding a mirror up to nature.’ You hold a magnifying glass up to nature.  As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation.  If it were a mirror, we would have no art.”

“[On his arrival in Hollywood:] I told them I wanted to choose my scripts and my directors myself.  ‘But sweetheart,’ they said, ‘you’re going to make a lot of mistakes.’ And I told them, ‘You don’t understand; I want to be free to do so.’”

“[Reported last words, when asked if he wanted to see one of his films on TV:] Absolutely not!”

Montgomery Clift has appeared in the following films:
The Search (1948)
Red River (1948)
The Heiress (1949)
The Big Lift (1950)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
I Confess (1953)
Stazione Termini (1953)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Raintree County (1957)
Lonelyhearts (1958)
The Young Lions (1958)
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Wild River (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Freud (1962)
The Love Goddesses (1965)
The Defector (1966)


Montgomery Clift contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
The Search (1948)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
The Defector (1966)