Why Burt Lancaster kept trying to murder his best friend: “Who cares if he tried to kill me?”
In addition to being one of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s definitive leading men, Burt Lancaster also earned a reputation for having one of the industry’s fieriest tempers. While he could always be relied upon to deliver the goods onscreen, plenty of people who worked with him were left quaking in their boots.
A relatively late bloomer, all things considered, Lancaster didn’t even make his screen debut until he was in his early 30s, although he quickly made up for lost time by establishing himself as one of the biggest box office draws of the 1950s and a regular fixture of the awards season circuit.
He shared the screen with Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, and countless other big-screen icons, and by the time he made his final outing in Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, he’d won an Academy Award from four nominations to complement his legendary status.
Throughout it all, he remained a hot-headed individual, with testimonies from multiple collaborators indicating that Lancaster wasn’t a man to be crossed. Infamous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called him “terrible-tempered Burt,” composer Elmer Bernstein branded him “really scary,” and Sydney Pollack admitted he was “a very intimidating man.”
That said, nobody got it worse than Michael Winner. The leading man and filmmaker worked together on 1971’s western Lawman and 1973’s spy flick Scorpio, where Lancaster developed the recurring habit of trying to murder his director. Still, Winner wasn’t dissuaded from being the victim of so many attempted homicides, going so far as to say that the actor remained his closest friend in the business.
“Burt Lancaster tried to kill me three times, and he was still my dearest friend,” he told Senses of Cinema. “I mean, he grabbed me by the throat, shaking me around, but it doesn’t matter. He was the most wonderful human being.” Close bonds can survive almost anything, but attempted murder? That’s real friendship.
When shooting Lawman, Winner accidentally caused a continuity error when he had Lancaster shoot a horse with a gun in one take, but then swapped it out for a different weapon in the next. When he informed the star that he’d have to shoot the scene again and it was his fault, he completely snapped.
“We would always argue,” he drastically undersold. “He threatened to kill me when he got in a temper. He dragged me up by the pelvis screaming, ‘You cocksucking asshole British piece of shit,’ the lot. Fuck me.” Winner was understandably terrified, but never to such an extent that Lancaster was knocked from his perch as his best friend in Hollywood.
Bizarrely, it may even have been a show of affection. As Winner remembered, he was left shaken by Lancaster constantly physically and verbally assaulting him, only to be informed by someone who was also familiar with his ways that “it was a very good sign” because “Burt only threatens to kill his friends.”
Looking back on their decades-long friendship, which he remained insistent on calling it, Winner evidently held no grudges despite being on the receiving end of multiple death threats: “Who cares if he tried to kill me a couple of times?”
