“Have your nose fixed,” High Noon producer Stanley Kramer told Lee Van Cleef, “and you can play the 3rd lead of the deputy. Right now, you look more like an outlaw.”
Van Cleef refused. That part went to Lloyd Bridges. Van Cleef got the part of one of the outlaws in his first movie. He’s seen alone and walks into close-up in the first scene.
After 122 movie & TV appearances, he was driving back from Lone Pine, Ca, after completing The Bravados with Gregory Peck, when he got into a head on collision breaking his knee. The doctors said he would never ride a horse again and would need a cane to walk.
After three years of no work, Van Cleef got a small uncredited part as a river pirate in How the West Was Won, and then three more unemployed years.
In 1965, after being turned down by Henry Fonda, Lee Marvin & Charles Bronson, Sergio Leone tracked down Van Cleef and offered him $17,000 for nine weeks on For a Few Dollars More with Clint Eastwood.
“Leone saved my career,” Van Cleef said. “I couldn’t even pay my phone bill at that time.”
“When can you leave for Europe?” Leone asked Van Cleef.
“I can leave today.”
Leone once said, “Van Cleef makes holes in the screen with his eyes.”
Van Cleef became a big star in Europe and popular in America, sending Kurt Russel on a mission in Escape from New York, and starring in the ninja-action TV show The Master. He ended up with 173 movie & TV appearances.
“I glad I refused to get my nose fixed,” Van Cleef laughed. “I believe that’s what got me all my parts.”
My mother, who played Betty Hutton's trapeze part in our grade school's Skit Night, thought that Van Cleef, "Is the most handsome man in the movies."
That was a remarkable break for him in that first of the spaghetti Westerns. Van Cleef played his part so well, especially when it came down to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where he epitomized "bad." It's that stirring music in the beginning of those movies that really gets your blood flowing along with Clint's squinting, steely resolute gaze against the sun and a possible ash in his eye that makes those movies the blockbusters they have become. I always want to watch them again for a nuance I haven't seen before.
Ron