Burt Lancaster Net Worth

Burt Lancaster's Quotes

• Most people seem to think I'm the kind of guy who shaves with a blowtorch. Actually I'm bookish and worrisome.
• [on being a director] It's the best job in the picture business because when you're a director, you're God. And you know that's the best job in town.
• Life is to be lived within the limits of your knowledge and within the concept of what you would like to see yourself to be.
• [speaking in 1983] Tits and sand - that's what we used to call sex and violence in Hollywood.
• I don't know why Airport (1970) was nominated for any Oscars - it's the biggest piece of junk ever.

Interesting Facts about Burt Lancaster

1. Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#100). [1995]
2. Graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York [1930]
3. Ranked #85 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. [October 1997]
4. Started out as a circus performer.
5. Father of actor/writer Bill Lancaster.
6. Was a big fan of the silent film The Unknown (1927), probably partially because the movie took place in a circus, and Burt himself spent a lot of time early in his life in a circus. He once said that no scene in any movie affected him as emotionally as the one in this movie in which Lon Chaney learns that Joan Crawford does not love him.
7. Suffered a severe stroke while visiting actor Dana Andrews, who was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Lancaster remained hospitalized until February 1991, and incapacitated and unable to speak until his death in October, 1994. [November 1990]
8. Was Cecil B. DeMille's first choice to play "Samson" in Samson and Delilah (1949).
9. 5 children: James Stephen "Jimmy" (born June 30, 1946), William "Billy" (born in November, 1947), Susan Elizabeth (born July 5, 1949), Joanna Mari (born in July, 1951) and Sighle (born in 1954).
10. Son Jimmy was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
11. According to Kate Buford in her biography "Burt Lancaster: An American Life," he felt competitive with Marlon Brando, who achieved stardom playing Stanley Kowalski on Broadway, a role Lancaster turned down. A Top 10 box-office success in the early 1960s, it was this sense of competition with Brando, who was known as both an actor's actor and a major movie star, that led Lancaster to plunge into art films and riskier fare such as Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963), in order to prove himself as an actor and be known as an artist rather than just a movie star. After this refocusing of his career, he slipped out of the Top 10 and never again was a major box office attraction.
12. Descended from Irish Protestants from Ulster who emigrated to the United States in the 1880s.
13. Known for his liberal political sympathies, he was one of the Hollywood movie stars, along with Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis Jr., Charlton Heston, Judy Garland, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, who participated in Martin Luther King's March on Washington in August 1963. He flew home from Europe, where he was making a film, to participate. He was a financial supporter of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
14. In 1947 he was offered the role of Stanley Kowalski in the original Broadway production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" after first choice John Garfield was rejected due to his demands for a ownership percentage of the play. He turned down the role that went to Marlon Brando and made him a legend.
15. He was voted the 39th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
16. One of his demands was that he have a high bar set up on sets and locations so he could perform acrobatics and stay in shape.
17. He admitted that an odd thing always happened to him on a movie set. He would complain about everything, sometimes very loudly. By the end of the shoot however, the crews loved him and hated to see him go, despite his complaints. He never understood why that happened.
18. He was an infamous ladies man in Hollywood, which eventually irritated his wife, Norma, enough for her to leave him.
19. Until undergoing emergency quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1983, he maintained the fantastic physical health he attained as an acrobat in his youth. He impressed many who knew him with his apparently enormous strength.
20. Felt intimidated by co-star Montgomery Clift on the set of From Here to Eternity (1953) due to Clift's great talent.