Robert Wilonsky sits down with actor George Chakiris to discuss several items he's putting up from auction at Heritage in July's Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction.
George Chakiris’ initial turn in the spotlight lasted only a few seconds, if you could even find the 15-year-old.
He made his big-screen debut in 1947, credited only as “Choir Boy” in Song of Love, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production starring Katharine Hepburn as 19th-century German pianist and composer Clara Schumann. So it went for nearly a decade: a long list of blink-and-you-miss-it moments in such films as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire alongside Marilyn Monroe, Brigadoon, White Christmas - usually as a dancer or chorus boy, constantly in the background, almost always uncredited. There’s no business like show business. (He was in that movie, too, somewhere.)
“I just dreamed of being in the movies,” Chakiris says now. “I had no idea how to do that. How would you even get that? But the desire was strong. And it was deepened by that time with the choir at Metro. … It was tremendous fun, a thrill to be there, to see Marilyn on the other side of the scene, just to be around those people. It was thrilling.”
Never more so than when he was cast as Bernado, leader of the Sharks, in Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s 1961 film adaptation of the Broadway smash West Side Story - for which Chakiris, blending into the background not so many years earlier, won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.
This summer, Heritage Auction is honored to present more than two dozen pieces from The Collection of George Chakiris during the July 25-26 Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction, among them some of his most treasured West Side Story memories.
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