'The boy with the ice cream face" (as he was was called by the crooked cop in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success) turns 80 this month. Tony Curtis has been in the game for 56 years, with 106 starring movie roles under his belt. In April, the actor, painter, and raconteur was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Jules Verne Film Festival, in Paris. "Only when I leave America," he says, "do I realize how famous I am."

In his long career, Curtis has worked with the best directors— Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, and Stanley Kubrick (his favorite) among them. We'll never forget him walking on his hands in the 1956 circus movie Trapeze, or teetering in high heels as Marilyn Monroe's boyfriend and girlfriend in 1959's Some Like It Hot. Or shackled to Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's 1958 prison-break movie, The Defiant Ones, or slipping out of handcuffs in 1953's Houdini. Or invited into Laurence Olivier's bath in Kubrick's 1960 Roman epic, Spartacus, or lured into Burt Lancaster's power-mad web as the scheming press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success.

"In my profession, you sell your freedom. But if you work it right, it won't destroy you," Curtis says. Now living outside Las Vegas, he always beat the odds: later this month 80 of his paintings will be shown at the MGM Grand, and Quentin Tarantino will direct him in the season finale of C.S.I. Curtis is still fearless. "It was no big deal to stand there naked," he says about the V.F. photo shoot. "I felt released. That's something for a man who's been in pictures for over 50 years."