‘Who cares if he tried to kill me?’: the volatile life and times of Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster, one of the greatest actors of his generation, was a volatile, violent man, who was feared and loathed by many top filmmakers. John Huston, who directed him in the 1960 Western, The Unforgiven, had such a bitter dispute with the actor that he took revenge when he found out his nemesis was co-sponsoring a celebrity golf tournament. Huston hired a small plane and had thousands of ping-pong balls, scrawled with insults such as “Burt Lancaster sucks”, dropped on the course. The tournament had to be abandoned.

Sixty years ago, Lancaster was basking in praise for his role as the scheming evangelist in Elmer Gantry. The film came out in America in July 1960 and was rolled out across Europe in the autumn, eventually having its UK premiere in December. Lancaster’s performance would win him a Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Actor at the 33rd Academy Awards the following April. “I was just being myself,” Lancaster said about playing the manipulative, lecherous Baptist minister from Sinclair Lewis’s novel.

To the public at the time, Lancaster was a revered star, a genuine action hero from films such as Gunfight at the OK Corral and From Here to Eternity. Within Hollywood circles, however, his true character was better known. Author Norman Mailer was a close friend of Lancaster’s – they were regular bridge partners in the 1960s – and even he once admitted, “I’ve never looked in eyes as chilling as Lancaster’s.” Celebrity gossip columnist Hedda Hopper used to refer to him as “terrible-tempered Burt”.

Burton Stephen Lancaster was born in a slum in the East Harlem area of New York known as “Little Italy” on November 2, 1913. His father was a postal clerk of Irish extraction, and his fierce mother Lizzie once savagely thrashed her young child for bringing back the wrong change from a grocery store. There were reports that he got into a knife fight at DeWitt Clinton High School, and spent several months recuperating from a wound. Lancaster admitted he was “a punk kid” who would have “grown up to be a criminal” had it not been for athletics and the public library, where he devoured the books of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald.

Lancaster, who was six feet two inches tall by the time he was 14, excelled at basketball, but he rejected a scholarship to play the sport at New York University in favour of becoming an acrobat at the Kay Brothers’ Circus. “It was a great life,” Lancaster later recalled, although he rarely talked about his brief marriage to a teenage acrobat called June Ernst.

A hand injury eventually forced him to quit the circus life in 1939, and over the next few years, Lancaster worked as a truck driver, firefighter, meat-packer and a haberdashery salesman at the Marshall Field department store in Chicago, where colleagues remembered him shocking customers by performing a handstand on a countertop and cartwheeling down an aisle.

He was drafted in 1942 and spent three years overseas in the Fifth Army's Special Services unit. “I had a wonderful time touring North Africa, Italy and Austria as page-turner for a soldier pianist,” he joked. During this time, he met a United Service Organisations entertainer called Norma Anderson. Back in New York, Norma helped him get a theatre audition, where he came to the attention of producer Mark Hellinger, who cast Lancaster in his first film role in The Killers alongside Ava Gardner. The crime thriller, based on a Hemingway story, came out in August 1946 and sent the 33-year-old to stardom. A couple of months later he married Norma.

Even in his Hollywood debut, Lancaster earned a reputation as a “difficult” actor. “That kid has made one picture and already he knows more than anyone on the lot,” complained Hellinger. That reputation would stay with Lancaster over his next 75 movies, in a career that spanned nearly 45 years.

Few actors could match Lancaster for his screen presence or sheer versatility. Among his most inspired performances were as the cunning, sleazy gossip writer J.J. Hunsecker (based on Walter Winchell) in Sweet Smell of Success, the 19th-century Sicilian prince in Visconti's The Leopard and the lonely ornithologist in Birdman of Alcatraz – which won him the Best Actor award at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. He also played a cleric, a remorse-stricken German accused of war crimes, and countless tough guys, cowboys, army sergeants and acrobats. Although he never had any formal training, Lancaster was always willing to take risks with roles.

In 1952, he played a middle-aged alcoholic chiropractor in Come Back, Little Sheba. In one key scene, Lancaster’s character loses his temper and attacks his long-suffering wife with a knife. The explosion of rage was convincing, and it’s no coincidence that countless Hollywood insiders testified to how frightening Lancaster was in real life. “Burt was really scary,” said Elmer Bernstein, who composed the score for Sweet Smell of Success. “He was a dangerous guy. He had a short fuse. He was very physical. You thought you might get punched out.”

Likewise, Sydney Pollack described Lancaster as “a very intimidating man”, and director Alexander McKendrick called him “scary”, later admitting that he felt threatened by the star. Sometimes the threats were more than just implied. One well-known Hollywood legend involved Lancaster punching Jack Palance so hard during an argument on the set of 1966’s The Professionals that he made his fellow Oscar-winning actor vomit. (The same story, it must be said, is told about Robert Mitchum and Palance on the set of 1953’s Second Chance.)

When Michael Winner directed Lancaster in Lawman in 1971, members of the crew complained about Lancaster’s angry outbursts. Winner, who acknowledged that Lancaster could be “a bit sarcastic”, later experienced the actor’s fury when he was grabbed and threatened with being thrown off a mountain in Durango.

“He threatened to kill me twice, actually, when he got in a temper,” Winner told Vice in 2009. “He dragged me up by the pelvis screaming, ‘You c---sucking a---hole British piece of s---!’ But he remained a dear friend, and he was a wonderful man, so who cares if he tried to kill me a couple of times?”

One of Lancaster’s nastiest altercations came in February 1984, also in Mexico, on the set of the movie Little Treasure. Lancaster, then 70 and recovering from heart bypass surgery, brawled with his 35-year-old female co-star Margot Kidder. The actress, who rose to fame as Lois Lane in the Superman movies, was playing Lancaster's estranged daughter.

“I wanted to do something in a scene he didn’t want me to do, and I said ‘No, you don’t understand,’ and he started whacking me… I virtually whacked him back ,” the late Kidder told AV Club in 2009. She admitted she had hurled a “horrible” insult at Lancaster, shouting “You washed-up old f--!” at him, during a brawl that left both with bloody cuts.

The homophobic insult suggested that Lancaster’s bisexual life was an open secret in the film world. Ernest Lehman, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind Sweet Smell of Success, recalled the shock of his first meeting with Lancaster in 1957. James Naremore’s 2010 book, Sweet Smell of Success, quotes him telling the tale: “I was sitting with the agent Harold Hecht. The door opened and in walked a towering, impressive figure. Burt Lancaster was zipping up his fly and smiling proudly, saying: ‘She swallowed it.’”

And as a party trick, recalled in Michael Mewshaw’s memoir Sympathy for the Devil, the author Gore Vidal used to act out an imitation of Lancaster’s actor friend (and fixer) Mickey Knox: “You have any idea how hard it is to get Burt Lancaster blown every night of the week?”

Despite his outwardly happy marriage to Norma – with whom he had five children, including screenwriter Bill Lancaster – Lancaster was long alleged to have had affairs with make-up girls, production assistants and actresses, including Marlene Dietrich, Shelley Winters and Deborah Kerr, with whom he shared the famous love scene on the beach in From Here to Eternity. The late Roger Moore remembered Tony Curtis passing on Lancaster’s advice about how to get away with being caught mid-assignation on set by your wife. It ran, Moore recalled in 2014: “Continue with what you’re doing, and when you get home, deny it and say, ‘But they have people who look like me.’”

When Kate Buford wrote her 2000 biography of Lancaster, she was told by surviving members of Lancaster’s family that the actor had often been “depressed” about being bisexual, and said his gay relationships were always on a short-term basis. In 2017, former rock and roll singer Vince Eager told the Nottingham Post that, as an 18-year-old boy, he was propositioned by 45-year-old Lancaster in a Soho nightclub. Lancaster offered him a movie role, Eager said, and added: “‘What we need to do is get you to my hotel.

“‘I am catching a plane to Los Angeles at lunchtime tomorrow,’” Eager recalled Lancaster going on, “‘so we need to talk about it over breakfast’. Then he put his hand on my thigh and said, ‘Do you understand?’… I turned him down, and Burt snarled at me and said, ‘You don’t come back with me now, boy, you ain’t gonna be in the movie.’”

Under orders from director J Edgar Hoover, the FBI kept files on Lancaster from 1948 – they did so until 1963 – partly because of imagined communist sympathies, but also to investigate his sexual behaviour in the 1950s. In 2000, six years after Lancaster’s death, files from the FBI probe came to light, revealing that secret agents photographed Lancaster at supposedly debauched orgies, ones also attended by Rock Hudson and “notorious Hollywood homosexuals”.

Lancaster had always been proud of his body – he cheerfully posed for nude photographs in his youth – and even in middle-age he kept in shape with daily runs at the University of California’s track ground. In 1968, at the age of 55, he spent the entire movie of The Swimmer wearing nothing but tight blue swimming trunks, having hired the coach of the university’s men’s water polo team to hone his swimming skills. The film was based on a short story by bisexual author John Cheever, who described Lancaster as looking “lithe and comely”. “His proportions are really quite perfect; he is like a Greek statue,” Buford said of images of Lancaster on set. There were reports of young men hanging around Lancaster’s dressing room. A year after the film came out, his 23-year marriage to Norma ended.

Lancaster was not blind to his own failings, admitting “I’m a pain in the neck… I try to direct pictures… I try to tell the other actors how to act… people hate me.” In 1948, along with agents Hecht and James Hill, Lancaster set up Hecht-Hill-Lancaster and started a film-making company called Norma Productions (named after his wife) to make movies. He gave a damning verdict on the culture of Hollywood. “If we were allowed to do some of the stories we wanted to do under the studio system, we wouldn't have had to start our own company. But they just wanted to do the same stories over and over again.”

The company made lots of terrific films, including The Flame and the Arrow, Sweet Smell of Success and Marty, which starred Ernest Borgnine and won four Oscars, including Best Picture. Robert Redford said that he once went to Hecht-Hill-Lancaster to audition for a part he did not get, and was “amazed” by the special trapeze and ropes Lancaster had built for himself inside the building. Lancaster’s daughter Joanna said that her father once made a prospective boyfriend scramble up a 25-foot rope “as a test” to see if he would be allowed to date her.

Away from the screen, Lancaster was a strong advocate of civil rights, and was one of the few actors given the honour of speaking at Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. He actively campaigned for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, and was subsequently named on President Nixon’s notorious 1973 “Enemies List”. Lancaster reportedly turned down Clint Eastwood’s iconic role in Dirty Harry because he believed it promoted a backward, Right-wing approach to law enforcement.

In 1984, Lancaster received the Mental Health Award from the UC Irvine Department of Psychiatry for his work on videotapes about the problems of those with long-term mental illnesses. In 1987, he was honoured as Man of the Year by the Aid for AIDS charity after posing for a poster captioned “Think before you act… don’t get AIDS”.

This recognition for his charity work came during an Indian summer for his career that included starring in Atlantic City (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Field of Dreams (1989). In Atlantic City, he earned his fourth and final nomination for the Best Actor Oscar, for playing an ageing gangster in Louis Malle’s masterpiece. Even as an OAP, Lancaster lost none of his appetite for confrontation. Buford’s biography recalls what happened when the French director asked him to tone down a delivery. Lancaster yelled, “OK, we’ll do it the way the little Froggie wants it, and then we’ll do it the way it should be done!”

In Local Hero, Lancaster was superb as an eccentric Texas oil baron. Director Bill Forsyth later told The Arts Desk: “He was no trouble at all. There was no ego. He was hard-working. Like me, he didn’t have a lot of small talk.” In 1985, Lancaster teamed up with his old friend Kirk Douglas for the comedy Tough Guys, about two ageing train robbers. Douglas and Lancaster had remained friends for decades, even though Lancaster supposedly once made the diminutive Douglas cry by making fun of the “lifts” in his shoes.

By the time Lancaster starred as a small-town doctor in the sentimental baseball movie Field of Dreams, his health was in steep decline. His life-long habit of chain smoking had already caused heart disease and in September 1990 it led to a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, just a couple of months after he had married 48-year-old television production co-ordinator Susan Scherer. Lancaster was incapacitated for the last four years of his life. At the end, he refused all visitors, even his old friend Douglas. Lancaster died of a heart attack at his California condominium, aged 80, on October 20 1994. He was buried privately, having decreed that there would be no funeral or memorial service.

His long-time mistress Jackie Bone said that she once saw Lancaster standing and staring on a golf course and thought to herself: “There is one unhappy man.” The film star always maintained that people misread his real character, insisting he was not abrasive or aggressive, and that “actually, I’m bookish and worrisome”.

Lancaster was once publicly challenged about his nasty side, when he appeared on Mike Wallace’s television chat show in April 1962 to promote Birdman of Alcatraz. “Burt Lancaster… got so angry at me that I thought he was going to hit me,” Wallace told Time Out New York. “His temper was positively lethal – I thought I might try to trigger it on air.”

In the end, Lancaster reacted to the persistent questions about his temper by storming off the set and leaving the studio. Fellow guest Barbra Streisand turned to Wallace and said: “You kept asking him about his temper, so he showed you he had it.”