Montgomery Clift

When Montgomery Clift first appeared on the screen in 1948 he was a completely new kind of actor: painfully sensitive, almost effeminately beautiful, and quite free of the tough-guy trappings of Hollywood's standard leading men. The roles he subsequently created in such classic films as A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity and The Misfits influenced a generation of moodily introverted young rebels and won the hearts of women the world over. Marlon Brando tried to compete with him, James Dean worshipped him, and every contemporary 'outsider' in the cinema - from De Niro to the Brat Packers - owes something to his legacy. But Monty Clift's was a wretchedly sad life. Emotionally disturbed, sexually confused, and physically destroyed by the use of drugs and alcohol, he passed his last ten years - after a serious car crash in 1956 - in what has been described as the cinema's longest suicide attempt. Jimmy Dean went out in a blaze of glory at twenty-four; Monty staggered on to the age of forty-six, by the end of his life almost unemployable. Beautiful Loser reveals Clift as never before, both in the rare archival photographs, many of them previously unpublished, and in Barney Hoskyn's powerful text. In his re-examination of the life and performances of this extraordinary actor, Hoskyns gives us an incisive new portrait of a Hollywood misfit who never knew what he was or what he wanted to be.