Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas dead aged 103
Kirk Douglas, the cleft-chinned movie legend who fought gladiators, cowboys and boxers on the screen, has died.
Kirk Douglas, a son of Russian immigrants who rose to play Spartacus and other legendary roles during Hollywood’s Golden Era, has died. He was 103.
With marble-bust features and an intense on-screen delivery, Douglas was among the most commanding — and last surviving — members of a class of stars who headlined big-screen epics at a time when movies were the dominant form of entertainment.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” his actor son Michael Douglas said in a statement posted to Facebook.
“To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to.
“But to me and my brothers Joel and Peter he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife Anne, a wonderful husband.
“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come, and a history as a renowned philanthropist who worked to aid the public and bring peace to the planet.
“Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad- I love you so much and I am so proud to be your son.”
He played boxers, reporters, detectives, soldiers, Vincent van Gogh, Doc Holliday and, in one of the most famous portrayals in Hollywood history, the gladiator and slave leader Spartacus.
After breaking out with the lead role in 1949’s Champion, Douglas went on to star in The Bad and the Beautiful and Ace in the Hole, highlights in a career that included collaborating with directors like Billy Wilder, acting alongside stars like Lana Turner and taking on political forces like Senator Joe McCarthy and his “blacklist” of suspected Communist sympathisers in Hollywood.
Douglas’s survivors include his son Michael Douglas, the Oscar-winning star of Wall Street and Behind the Candelabra. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1996, the elder Douglas had to reacquire the ability to speak. Accepting an honorary Oscar about two months later, Douglas said to the room of Hollywood elite, “I thank all of you for 50 wonderful years.”
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, to Russian immigrants who had seven children and little money. His father sold rags to support the family.
“Even in our poor neighbourhood, the ragman was the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman’s son,” he wrote in Life Could Be Verse, a collection of poetry and remembrances published in 2014.
Douglas’s first role came in second grade, as the shoemaker in the school play The Shoemaker and the Elves. As an adult, his imposing jawline and athletic build helped him stand out, first as a college wrestler at New York’s St. Lawrence University and then as a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
At the acting school, Douglas studied the rigorous Stanislavski techniques that train actors to call on emotional memory to produce deeper performances. He also dated classmate Betty Joan Perske, later known as Lauren Bacall, who went on to introduce Douglas to valuable Hollywood connections.
Douglas’s first audition, for Mae West, didn’t go well. As his book recounted, the actress and provocateur spotted him in a room of young actors, looked him over and said: “Thank you for coming. You can go now.”
Nonetheless, Douglas’s first feature role in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) set him on a path that would keep him steadily on screen for the next half-century.
Douglas scored three Oscar nominations for best actor in the 10 years following that debut, for Champion in 1949, The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956. He didn’t win any of them, taking home his first Oscar when he received the honorary award in 1996.
His most famous role, as the title character in the 1960 movie Spartacus, put him at the centre of one of the great controversies of Hollywood in the 20th century. The film’s screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, was among the “Hollywood 10,” industry players who had been cited and black-listed for refusing congressional demands to explain alleged involvement with the Communist Party.
When Douglas, also the film’s executive producer, announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter on the film and would be credited on-screen, many in Hollywood started to see the blacklist fade away, historians now say. But the move didn’t make Douglas the most popular man in America.
“I think the drama of getting Trumbo’s name on the script was more dramatic than the movie itself,” he later wrote. The movie cost a then-staggering $US12 million to produce but went on to be one of the biggest hits of the era.
The movie produced one of the most famous scenes of all time, when a group of slaves all stand and shout, “I’m Spartacus!” around Douglas to avoid their leader being found by Roman forces.
Spartacus was developed at Bryna Productions, a production company founded by Mr. Douglas and named for his mother, and directed by a young Stanley Kubrick. The company would also produce Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, another memorable vehicle for Douglas.
Douglas showed up to sets with questions — about his character and everything else in the script, said Jeff Kanew, a director who worked with Douglas on several projects, including Eddie Macon’s Run, Tough Guys and the actor’s one-man stage show, Before I Forget. Inconsistencies in character development or pacing would be noted on the first day, and when Kanew pushed back, Douglas countered, “I’ve made a few movies too, you know.” The director soon realised the actor knew what he was talking about. On Eddie Macon’s Run, it was Douglas’s idea to treat a tough interrogation scene as a “seduction,” telling Kanew that he was drawing on a counterintuitive approach he discovered in a similar scene in Champion. When Burt Lancaster, his co-star in 1986’s Tough Guys, wanted to postpone the project, Douglas put in a call and soon the production was back on. As he explained to Kanew, “I just told him that one of these days one of us is going to do the other guy’s eulogy, and you don’t want the legacy to be bailing on a movie.”
Douglas and his wife, Anne Buydens, who survives him, married in 1954 after meeting on the set of his film Act of Love. Together, they became known in Los Angeles for significant philanthropic donations to organisations like the Los Angeles Unified School District, the city’s Children’s Hospital and the Kirk Douglas Theatre, which opened in 2004 and still stages productions.
Despite rising to fame in Hollywood’s strict, image-driven studio system, Douglas didn’t hesitate to share personal details about his life and Jewish faith in his later years. He wrote a blog on Myspace and then the Huffington Post, and wrote 10 novels and memoirs.
Even the most intimate moments were fair game, including one story that occurred soon after his stroke in 1996. After returning home from the hospital one day, Douglas found a revolver he had kept as a memento from his 1957 hit Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It was loaded.
“I stuck the barrel in my mouth — ‘Ouch!’ ” he wrote in Life Could Be Verse. “I pulled it away. Then I began to laugh. A toothache stopped me from committing suicide.”
In addition to Michael Douglas and Buydens, Kirk Douglas is survived by two other sons. His youngest son, Eric, died in 2004. Douglas was married to Diana Douglas from 1943 to 1951; sons Michael and Joel are from that first marriage.
Douglas received numerous awards in addition to his honorary Oscar, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Kennedy Center Honor and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Wall Street Journal
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