ACTOR KIRK DOUGLAS DIES AT 103.
HIS PERFORMANCES WERE OFTEN MULTILAYERED ONES
Kirk Douglas, the three-time Oscar-nominated actor who played resolute heroes and formidable villains in more than 80 movies, including Spartacus and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, has died. He was 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” his Oscar-winning son, Michael Douglas, said Wednesday on Instagram. “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.”
Known for his toothy grin, cleft chin, blazing eyes and granite-chiselled features, Douglas specialized in self-centred, cocky characters and worked with top directors including Stanley Kubrick and Vincente Minnelli.
He won lifetime achievement awards from the American Film Institute in 1991 and the Screen Actors Guild in 1999 and, in 1996, an honorary Academy Award “for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.” It was presented by his son, Michael, who had won an Oscar for best actor in Wall Street. Other sons and a grandson also worked in films.
On stage at the 2011 Oscars to announce the best-supporting-actress winner, Douglas, at 94, poked fun at his own failure to win one of the trophies for acting. “I’ll never forget this moment,” he said. “Three times, and I lost every time.”
His portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life did earn him a Golden Globe and a New York Film Critics Circle Award. He also won a Best Picture Golden Globe for Spartacus. In 1981, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Douglas infused every role with passion, and his performances were often multilayered ones,” movie critic Leonard Maltin said. “He could bring sinister traits to sympathetic characters, and vice versa.”
Film critics called the agile, athletic Douglas one of the first action heroes, from his performance in films including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).
In Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Douglas created a humorous rivalry with Burt Lancaster, playing Doc Holliday to Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp. The two made six films together.
He said his biggest career regret was not playing the main character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), co-produced by his son Michael, which won an Academy Award. He had played the lead on stage in the 1960s but was too old by the time the film was ready to shoot.
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky on Dec. 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, N.Y. His parents, Harry and Bryna, were illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants. His father sold rags. In The Ragman’s Son, his 1988 autobiography, Douglas said his impoverished childhood was fraught with anti-semitism that fuelled his ambition.
He made his film debut in 1946 as Barbara Stanwyck’s district-attorney husband in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. His breakout role as devious boxer Midge Kelly in 1949’s Champion cemented his intense screen persona, and earning him an Oscar nomination.
He was nominated for two more Oscars, as a ruthless movie producer in The Bad and the Beautiful and as Van Gogh in Lust for Life.
In his later years, he appeared mostly in character roles. In 2003, Douglas starred with his first wife Diana, son Michael and grandson Cameron in It Runs in the Family. Diana Douglas died in 2015.
After surviving a helicopter crash in 1991, Douglas reconnected with his Jewish faith. He studied the Talmud and Torah and made his second bar mitzvah at age 83. He wrote two children’s books about Judaism.
In 2002, he wrote My Stroke of Luck, detailing his battle with depression after a stroke. Douglas said he became suicidal, putting the loaded gun he had used in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in his mouth. Before he could pull the trigger, he hit a bad tooth, causing such pain he had second thoughts.
He had four sons from two marriages, all of whom entered the movie business — Joel and Peter as producers, Michael and Eric as actors. Eric Douglas died in 2004.