Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who came out of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s to find both wide popularity and critical acclaim in dramatic and comic roles alike, from “The Defiant Ones” to “Some Like It Hot,” died on Wednesday at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. He was 85.

The cause was cardiac arrest, the Clark County coroner said.

Mr. Curtis, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s golden age, became a respected dramatic actor, earning an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in “The Defiant Ones,” a 1958 Stanley Kramer film. But he was equally adept in comedies; his public even seemed to prefer him in those roles, flocking to see him, for example, in the 1965 slapstick hit “The Great Race.”

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley and his plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early ’50s.

A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot” (1959); a slave who attracts the interest of an aristocratic Roman general (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960); a man attracted to a mysterious blonde (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).