Thomas Quinn Curtiss
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Thomas Quinn Curtiss (June 21, 1915 New York City – July 27, 2000, Poissy, France) was a writer, and film and theater critic.
The son of Roy A. Curtiss and Ethel Quinn graduated from the Browning School in New York in 1933. He went on to study film and theater in Vienna and in Moscow, where he was a student of film director Sergei Eisenstein.
In summer 1937, he met writer Klaus Mann in Budapest and followed him through Europe. Their homosexual relationship lasted for several years, but eventually Tomski, as Curtiss is called in Mann's diaries, left him because of Mann's on-going heroin addiction. Mann's suicidal novel Vergittertes Fenster is dedicated to him.
Curtiss enlisted in the New York 7th Regiment before World War II. He was stationed with Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in 1944 and later with the U.S. 8th Air Force, where he secured the hidden film library from the Luftwaffe for the Allies, an act that won him the Legion of Honor from the French government and which was presented by General Charles DeGaulle.
After the war, he became a film and theatre critic for various newspapers and magazines, including New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and Variety, before he joined the International Herald Tribune for which he continued to write until long after his retirement.
Curtiss regularly lived in Paris, where he often went out with movie actors and directors. He wrote several books, including a biography of Erich von Stroheim, whom he already admired in his youth. He also appeared in the documentary The Man You Loved To Hate on Stroheim's life. He also wrote the script for the 1973 screen adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
