Kirk Douglas
Hollywood legend known for a string of westerns and war films including ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Paths of Glory’
KIRK Douglas, the actor, who has died aged 103, was a towering figure in Hollywood’s postwar golden age, the lantern-jawed star of more than 80 films such as Gunfight at the OK Corral, Paths of Glory and Spartacus; only his dimpled chin provided a note of vulnerability in an otherwise rugged physique.
While on screen he suffered an alarming level of physical punishment — losing an eye in The Vikings, smashing his ribs in The Indian Fighter (1954) and being crucified in Spartacus — all that was artifice: in reality, too, Douglas frequently diced with death, narrowly missing a real arrow shot at him while filming The Indian Fighter, surviving a five-day coma after a fight scene in Light At The Edge of the World (1971), a heart attack in 1989, and a helicopter crash two years later and a stroke a few years after that.
During his heyday in the early 1950s, a stream of high-octane roles perfectly matched his abrasive personality. In Billy Wilder’s mordant satire Ace in the Hole (1951) he was horribly authentic as the tabloid journalist who thinks nothing of prolonging a man’s suffering to keep a human interest story in the headlines.
In The Bad and Beautiful (1952), he was the perfect choice as a Hollywood producer who would sacrifice anyone — director, author, lover or friend — for next year’s Academy Award.
But in real life, when it came to the Academy Awards, Douglas was passed over — until in 1996 he was finally given an Oscar for lifetime achievement.
His son Michael — with whom he engaged in a bitter competitive relationship — won two Oscars as a producer of the 1975 hit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and as an actor in Wall Street (1987), where he played the kind of ruthless wheeler-dealer Kirk Douglas himself might have played a generation earlier.
But then Douglas’s life and career involved a constant battle between star-struck delusion and reality, at least until he was well into middle age. When filming one of his most personable roles, in the Bahamas, the sailor Ned Land in 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea, he claimed: “I met a beautiful young woman in a temple where they had sacrificed virgins. Then she and I climbed the steps of a pyramid that was devoted to the worship of genitalia. On the top of the pyramid, she became a worshipper.”
Even by Hollywood standards, Douglas was sexually promiscuous and boastful. However, his glamorous escorts, such as Rita Hayworth, Patricia Neal, Gene Tierney and Joan Crawford, were not always impressed. “It’s wonderful that you shaved your armpits,” Crawford told him after his success in the boxing picture Champion (1949).
On the Italian set of Ulysses (1953), even the dog found it difficult to give Douglas the degree of devotion which its legendary forbear had shown for Homer’s character which he was playing. It took a dislike to him on sight, constantly snubbed him on camera and had to be drugged into submission.
The son of an illiterate, alcoholic Russian Jewish immigrant who became a ragand-bone man, he was born Issur Danielovich Demsky on December 9, 1916, at Amsterdam, an industrial town in upstate New York. He was the only son in a family of six daughters.
His first appearance on stage, aged six, was as the shoemaker in The Shoemaker and the Elves at East Main Street School. Later, he revealed that this had introduced him to the powerful effect of drama when a teacher tried to seduce him in an English class.
After graduating he worked as a school janitor, bellboy and assistant in a department store before going to St Lawrence University at Canton, New York. Douglas claimed that he managed to persuade the college authorities to grant him a loan after telling his family, “I want to find my
green isle in the sea”. But later he commented: “Horses**t had always played an important part in my life. I arrived at college reeking of it.” To help supplement his income he became partner to a wrestler known as ‘The Mighty Marvel’.
After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in June 1941, Douglas landed small parts on Broadway, before being drafted into the United States navy.
After training at the Notre Dame Midshipman School in South Bend, Indiana, he served as a communications officer in a patrol boat in the Pacific. In November 1943 he married the British actress Diana Dill, daughter of the attorney-general of Bermuda.
Douglas got his first major postwar acting break at the recommendation of his friend Lauren Bacall, in The Strange
Love of Martha Ivers (1946) where he gave an impressive performance as Barbara Stanwyck’s alcoholic husband.
He then sealed his future in pictures with I Walk Alone, the first of several collaborations with Burt Lancaster, and Joe Mankiewicz’s enduring A Letter to Three Wives, in which he excelled, against type, as a sensitive schoolteacher.
Douglas’s efforts in more intellectually demanding pieces, such as Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) and The Glass Menagerie (1950), were frequently disappointing. But there was little doubt about the force of his screen performances, which fizzled with an energy that threatened to turn into searing hatred: his flair for depicting villains was shown early on in the role of the smoothly lethal gangster Whit Sterling in Jacques Tourneur’s classic film noir Out of the Past (1947).
The unease Douglas engendered seemed to be confirmed by his tendency to become involved in on-set mishaps; in one scene of Champion, where he played the boxer Midge Kelly, he really was knocked unconscious.
At the same time his ambition went with an obsessive concern for reputation, which made him leap to his own defence when silence would have been wiser. He once went on Russian radio after making Ulysses to deny a scurrilous Soviet calumny that “Mr Douglas was so impressed with the script that he asked if Mr Homer had written any others.”
Douglas had a taste for radically changing scripts and shooting plans which drove directors to the edge of their tolerance. When making Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), he stayed up all night with Burt Lancaster, rewriting his dialogue in an attempt to override John Sturges.
By the mid-1950s Douglas was able to begin producing his own pictures. The Bryna company, named after his mother, produced the western Man Without a Star (1955), directed by King Vidor. Most notable was Lust for Life (1956), his bizarre rendering of Irving Stone’s bestseller about Vincent van Gogh. Sporting a beard, Douglas certainly bore a physical resemblance to the painter; and he proved a better choice for the part than Spencer Tracy in a 1946 MGM film. Douglas was also a tireless promoter of some distinguished projects, most notably One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Bryna’s best production was probably Paths of Glory (1957), an uncompromising World War I drama about the trumped-up court martial of three French soldiers.
Douglas gives a powerfully restrained performance as Colonel Dax, who sees his men scapegoated after a failed operation, and the film was superbly directed by Stanley Kubrick, a man for whom Douglas initially had great admiration, though he later scaled this down after working with him on Spartacus in 1959: Kubrick was, by then, “a talented s**t”.
Among the more interesting films he made at the start of the 1960s were Richard Quine’s contemporary melodrama on marital infidelity, Strangers When We Meet (1960), in which Douglas’s architect embarks on an affair with his neighbour Kim Novak, and he played a modern cowboy in Lonely are the Brave (1962).
Through the rest of that decade and into the 1970s, Douglas kept himself busy with westerns and war films.
He directed two films: Scalawag (1973) was Treasure Island repurposed as a western, with Douglas billed as “Long John Silver and Jesse James rolled into one”; he enjoyed more success with Posse two years later as a self-serving US marshal in pursuit of Bruce Dern’s bank robber.
As he grew older, Douglas turned towards self-parody in the roles he chose. In Home Movies (1979) he played an egocentrically comic star, and in Greedy (1994) he was Michael J Fox’s crafty uncle.
Old age was not kind to Douglas, but he accepted what he received. He was involved in a helicopter crash, which left him with broken ribs and some severe guilt feelings about the two young pilots killed. In 1995, a few months before he was awarded the Oscar for lifetime achievement, Douglas suffered a massive stroke, and Diana Dill, to whom he was married between 1943 and 1950, published a memoir describing him as a “sexually voracious bird of prey”.
Although the stroke left his speech impaired, Douglas recovered sufficiently to write My Stroke of Luck (2000). After nearly 60 years of wedlock — he married his second wife, Anne Buydens, in 1954 — he still claimed to have one of Hollywood’s happiest marriages.
Kirk Douglas is survived by his wife Anne and three sons (another son, Eric, died in 2004 of a drugs overdose): Michael, the actor, and the producers Joel and Peter.
Kirk Douglas died on February 5, 2020.
‘His life and career involved a constant battle between delusion and reality’