Montgomery Clift was, between 1948 and 1956, one of Hollywood's most marketable stars, worshipped alike by fans and critics. A three-time Oscar nominee, Clift possessed a complex star image, where his rigorous approach to acting jostled with a heart-throb status, and with thinly veiled sexual ambiguity. Every conflicting facet, however, was subordinated to a single unifying factor: his exceptional beauty, as perfect and dazzling as to place him in a canon of his own (see Figure 11.1). On 12 May 1956, this beauty vanished forever in a horrific car accident, when Clift's face was virtually destroyed. Although painstakingly ‘repaired’, miraculously unscarred, and certainly not plunged into ugliness, Clift was left with permanently altered features, a semi-paralysed left cheek, and a plethora of health conditions. His long yet private history of alcoholism, multiple addictions and depressive tendencies was suddenly exposed, legible in the visible trauma of his broken face. At the age of thirty-seven, Montgomery Clift was an ailing, prematurely aged man, struggling to cope with physical and mental pain; he was also facing an increasingly hostile Hollywood, and a disoriented, ambivalent fan base. Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk, 1956), the film he had been shooting at the time of his car crash, was released with the two versions of his face, pre-and post-accident, often combined in the same sequence. A deeply unsettling aura surrounded his star persona. Against this fraught background, Clift chose The Young Lions as the film to mark his return to the screen. This chapter approaches The Young Lions as a site of ‘abnormal’ stardom, and as Clift's act of subversive intervention in his own image; in so doing, it seeks to challenge traditional star studies, which overwhelmingly highlight notions of pleasure and attraction – however complex – in relation to film stars. By framing Clift within a set of deliberately unusual, even disturbing references, as provided by frameworks of queer and ‘crip’ identities, this analysis rectifies orthodox understandings of stardom, considering instead the visceral difference at the core of Clift's star persona. While issues of ageing have now started to be addressed by star scholars, there is still a notable lack of research in the more unsettling aspects of screen personalities; this chapter suggests to open the field to the troubling, painful and allegedly ghastly connotations of film stars.