KIRK DOUGLAS
BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKTIN CHANNELLING the pent up anger created from his impoverished childhood, Kirk Douglas’s rugged good looks and muscular intensity propelled him to Hollywood stardom.
Millions flocked to watch his movies as he became a member of a pantheon of leading men, among them Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman.
To men, he embodied everything they strove to be, while women fawned over his brooding chiselled looks.
But while celebrated with awards for his onscreen appearances, Douglas’s finest role was that of Hollywood’s greatest hero behind the cameras.
As while his names appeared in lights around the world, his confrontation of Tinsel Town’s darkest chapter in history is the legacy he has left behind following his death at 103 on Wednesday.
Rallying against his paymaster movie bosses, Douglas refused to kowtow to industry pressure, defying the anti-communist blacklist in the U.S. during the late 1940s and early 50s
After freeing himself from the shackles of a studio contract he, like Burt Lancaster and John Wayne, formed his own company and, making waves in Hollywood, he embarked on the 1960 film version of Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s Roman epic.
He played the rebellious Thracian Spartacus who, born and raised a slave, is sold to gladiator trainer Batiatus. After weeks of being trained to kill for the arena, Spartacus turns on his owners and leads the other slaves in rebellion.
Douglas insisted on hiring blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – expelled during the McCarthy era on suspicion of Communist sympathies – to write the movie.
So defiant was Douglas he went on to put Trumbo’s name in the credits rather than one of the pseudonyms he used.
“It was such a terrible, shameful time,” Douglas said. “Dalton was in prison because he refused to answer questions, so I decided, the hell with it. I’m going to put his name on it.
“I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of because it broke the blacklist.”
Douglas said he probably only got away with the move because Universal Studios was in the process of being sold and was in a weak bargaining position.
Whatever the case, the decision to name Trumbo started the ball rolling to end the blacklist, paving the way for others to follow suit.
Douglas’s willingness to fight for what he believed came from his tough upbringing. Born the poor son of an illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrant in December 1916, he was named Issur Danielovitch. Growing up in Amsterdam, New York, a city 35 miles northwest of Albany, he was one of seven children, six of them sisters.
By the time he went to school, the family name changed to Demsky and Issur had become Isadore, or Izzy.
The town’s mills did not hire Jews, so his father Herschel became a rag and bone man. “Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder,” Douglas wrote. “I was the ragman’s son.”