Burt Lancaster went from circus acrobat to Hollywood star via an elevator
After an injury ended his circus act and the war ended his Army entertainment job, Burt Lancaster was visiting his girlfriend at work when a producer sharing the elevator urged him to audition for Broadway. He was 32, not keen on acting, and got the part anyway.
Lancaster was born on 2 November 1913 at home on East 106th Street in Manhattan, the son of a mailman, with all four grandparents from Ulster. Growing up in East Harlem he starred at basketball and gymnastics at DeWitt Clinton High School and won an athletic scholarship to NYU, then dropped out. At nine he had met Nick Cravat, who became a lifelong partner; they learned theatre and circus skills at a settlement house and in the 1930s toured as the acrobatic duo Lang and Cravat until an injury in 1939 forced Lancaster to quit. He sold goods at Marshall Field's and worked as a singing waiter before joining the Army in 1943, entertaining troops in Italy with the Fifth Army.
The play, A Sound of Hunting, lasted three weeks, but it caught the eye of the agent Harold Hecht, who won Lancaster over by promising that within five years they would be producing their own films. The Killers in 1946 made him a star, and Hecht delivered: their company later became Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, one of the notable independent outfits of the 1950s, behind Sweet Smell of Success and Separate Tables.
His acrobatics never went to waste. In The Flame and the Arrow, a $6 million success for Warners, and The Crimson Pirate, he and Cravat did much of their own stunt work. The latter opens with Lancaster telling viewers to believe only what they see, then reversing footage of a mast-to-mast rope swing and revising the advice to half. Trapeze in 1956 won him a Silver Bear.
He grew into weightier parts, winning the Oscar for the preacher-conman Elmer Gantry and playing an Italian prince for Visconti in The Leopard. His fourth Oscar nomination came for Atlantic City in 1980. A stroke in 1990 ended his career, his last film role having been Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams, and he died in 1994.
Source: Burt Lancaster
