On the 5th of May 2010, a dying man in Nevada signed a new will. He was one of the biggest movie stars of the twentieth century and had four months to live. In that document, he listed his children by name, including the most famous of them, and then wrote that he acknowledged their existence and had intentionally chosen to give them nothing. The man was Tony Curtis.
The daughter was Jamie Lee Curtis, who by then had been one of the most famous actresses in America for thirty years. To understand how a father arrives at a sentence like that, you have to go back to a tailor’s shop in the Bronx and to a boy who had almost nothing at all. He was born Bernard Schwartz in 1925, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. His father, Emanuel, was a tailor.
The family lived in the back of the shop, and the Depression made a hard life harder. At one point, his parents could not feed their children, and Bernard and his brother were placed for a month in a state institution while the family tried to get back on its feet. His mother, Helen, had schizophrenia and was, by his own later accounts, violent toward him. When Bernard was a boy, his younger brother Julius ran into the street and was killed by a truck.
Before he was twelve, Bernard Schwartz had learned that families come apart, that the people you love vanish, and that nobody is coming to fix it. He got out through the Navy, serving in the Pacific during the war aboard a submarine tender and watching the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay from a distance of a few hundred yards. He came home, used the GI Bill to study acting, and was spotted in a New York theater by a talent scout. Universal signed him.
They gave him a new name, a new voice coach, new teeth, a new face for the posters. Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis. By the early 1950s, he was among the most beautiful and bankable men in America: Some Like It Hot, Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones, which brought him an Academy Award nomination in 1958, and Spartacus. More than a hundred films across fifty years.
In 1951, he married the actress Janet Leigh. For most of that decade, they were, in the eyes of America, the perfect Hollywood couple: magazine covers, matching smiles, fan clubs. They had two daughters, Kelly, born in 1956, and Jamie Lee, born in 1958. The marriage ended in 1962, when Tony left for a German actress, Christine Kaufmann, whom he had met on the set of Taras Bulba.
She was seventeen when they met. He was thirty-seven, married, and the father of two small girls. Jamie Lee was four years old when her father left. Kelly was six.
Their childhood with him would be shaped by visits rather than by an ordinary daily life. Tony Curtis would marry six times: Janet Leigh, Christine Kaufmann, Leslie Allen, Andrea Savio, Lisa Deutsch, and finally Jill Vandenberg. He would have six children with three different wives. By his own public admission in later years, he ended up largely estranged from all of them.
When a father is estranged from one child, you look at the child. When a father is estranged from six across three marriages and fifty years, you are looking at something else entirely. Jamie Lee has spoken about those years carefully and without cruelty. She has described a father who was present in the way famous fathers of that era often were, intermittently and on his own terms.
There were visits, there were photographs. There was not an ordinary daily life with him in it. She has been open about the fact that she grew up with money and fame and a surname that opened every door in Hollywood, and that none of it protected her from what was happening inside the family. She has also spoken for years, without prompting, about her own addiction.
It began in her thirties with painkillers prescribed after routine surgery and lasted roughly a decade. She got sober in February 1999. Her father had been through the same thing. He smoked, drank heavily, and used cocaine through the seventies and into the eighties.
He eventually went to the Betty Ford Center. A father and a daughter who had both walked through the same fire separately. It did not bring them together. There was one more thing.
In 1994, Tony’s son Nicholas died of a heroin overdose. He was twenty-three. Nicholas was Tony’s son from his third marriage to Leslie Allen, a half-brother to Jamie Lee and Kelly. His death sits in the middle of this family like a stone in water.
Tony founded a drug prevention foundation in his son’s name. But it did not bring the family back together. The death of a child, the father’s recovery, the daughter’s recovery: there were at least three moments where a family like this one might have closed ranks. None of them did.
In 1998, at seventy-three, Tony Curtis married for the sixth and final time. Her name was Jill Vandenberg. She was twenty-seven, a horse trainer, not an actress, and by every account genuinely devoted to him for the twelve years they were married. They ran a horse rescue ranch together in Nevada.
When he was ill, she cared for him. Jill has never been shown to have done anything wrong. When his daughter Kelly later went to court alleging that her father had been influenced, the court rejected the claim. Jill has said that Tony told his children himself that they were being disinherited before he died, and that the relationship between her husband and his children was already fractured long before she arrived.
Both claims are consistent with everything else in this story. Tony spent his last years in Nevada with a wife young enough to be his granddaughter, largely apart from the six children he had made across half a century. In May 2010, four months before he died, he rewrote his will. He was eighty-five and had suffered years of ill health, the accumulated bill for decades of smoking and drinking.
He died on the 29th of September 2010 of cardiac arrest at his home in Henderson, Nevada. He was buried with a few of his favorite things: a Stetson hat, an Armani scarf, and his iPhone. The will was filed in Clark County on the 12th of October, two weeks after the funeral. Because probate documents are public, the contents went around the world within days.
Here is what he wrote. Five of his six children were still alive. He listed all five by name: Kelly, Jamie Lee, Alexandra, Allegra, Benjamin. And then the clause: I acknowledge the existence of my children and have intentionally and with full knowledge chosen not to provide for them.
The construction is the whole story. He did not forget them. A will does not require you to mention people you are not providing for. He chose to mention them.
He named them individually, including the daughter whose face was on cinema screens around the world. Every word in that clause made it impossible for anyone to argue that this was an accident. A will that simply omits a child can be challenged. This one answered that question in advance, in the parent’s own voice.
He could have done it privately. Any competent attorney could have moved the estate into a trust years earlier and kept the whole thing out of the public record. He did it the other way. He put it in a will, which is filed with a court, which is a public document.
Within days, the contents were in newspapers on three continents. His estate, estimated at somewhere between four and sixty million dollars, went to Jill. About a year after Tony died, nearly five hundred of his personal possessions were sold at auction. It brought in more than a million dollars.
Handwritten letters, his artwork, memorabilia from the films that had made him, his awards. By the children’s account, they were never notified, and they received nothing from it. Not a share of the money, which they had no legal right to, but also not a letter, not a painting, not a single object out of a life that had also been their father’s life. The ordinary objects you would want your children and grandchildren to have went to strangers at an auction house in a single afternoon.
Kelly, the eldest, filed suit. She alleged undue influence. The court rejected it. The document had been written exactly well enough to hold against a lawsuit brought by a determined adult child with the means to fight it.
So what was the real reason? Tony Curtis never spelled it out. But he did say one thing publicly in his later years, and it is the closest thing we have to an answer from his own mouth. He admitted that he was largely estranged from all of his children.
He said it as a description of his own life, the way you might report the weather. There is no documented single event that explains the rupture. What there is instead is a pattern running across six decades and three marriages and six children of a man who kept starting over. A new wife, a new house, a new life.
And each time, the previous version receded a little further, including the children in it. Run the sequence. Janet Leigh and two daughters left in 1962. Christine Kaufmann and two more daughters left in 1968.
Leslie Allen and two more children left in 1982. Then three more marriages in sixteen years. Then Jill and twelve years in Nevada. He did not so much reject his family as leave it behind over and over, the way he had left the Bronx behind, the way he had left Bernard Schwartz behind when Universal handed him a new name and a new face.
Starting again was the thing he was best at. It was how he had survived his childhood. And the cost of being that good at leaving is that eventually there is no one left in the room. The will was not the moment he abandoned his children.
The will was the paperwork at the end of a process that had been running since 1962, when a four-year-old girl watched her father move out. Now look at what she did with it. Jamie Lee Curtis did not disappear into the wreckage of that family. She built one of the longest careers in Hollywood, starting with Halloween in 1978 when she was nineteen, through Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies, and beyond.
She wrote children’s books. She got sober in February 1999 after roughly a decade of addiction to painkillers that had begun after routine cosmetic surgery. Instead of hiding it, she went public with it and has spoken about recovery openly ever since. She married the actor and director Christopher Guest in 1984.
They are still married today, more than forty years later. They raised two children. She has spoken again and again about deliberately choosing the exact opposite of the life she grew up inside: one house, one marriage, one family stayed in. In March 2023, at sixty-four years old, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Tony Curtis was nominated once in 1958 for The Defiant Ones. He lost. Janet Leigh was nominated once for Psycho. She lost.
Neither of Jamie Lee’s parents ever won. Their daughter, the one he wrote out of his will by name, has one. And when she accepted it, she used part of her speech to thank them both, saying she was an actress who had come from two nominated parents, and she honored them by name. So go back to that room in Nevada in May 2010.
An old man four months from death, sitting with a lawyer, going through the names of his own children so that each of them could be excluded on the record. He had escaped the back room of a tailor shop, a mother who was ill, a brother killed in the street. He became one of the most photographed faces on earth. He married six women.
He made a hundred films and a fortune. He ended his life in the desert with a wife forty-five years his junior, having lost touch with every child he ever had. Tony Curtis kept the fortune, the six marriages, and the face on the poster. He kept the escape he had engineered as a boy all the way to the end.
Jamie Lee kept her sobriety, a marriage that has lasted four decades, two children who still speak to her, a career longer than his, and in the end, the award he never won. One of them spent a lifetime learning how to leave. The other spent hers learning how to stay.