Brian Pendreigh: The Kirk Douglas I knew
● Brian Pendreigh looks back at the life of the Hollywood icon who died at 103
In the 1960s, when I was a boy, I used to press my finger into my chin to replicate Kirk Douglas’s dimple. I grew up on his historical adventures and westerns, preferring his complex, flawed characters to John Wayne’s barrelchested dimwits. I wanted the dimple and the swagger and the grand gestures. I wanted to say: “I am Spartacus”.
This most Scottishsounding of Hollywood superstars was of east European Jewish stock, but Kirk Douglas sounded more like a movie star than Issur Danielovitch. He did come to Scotland in the early 1970s to make Catch Me a Spy. Pursued across the Highlands, he is seen fishing on Loch Awe, at the local railway station, on the Ballachulish ferry and running through a herd of Highland cattle.
Years later I met him at a film festival in Palm Springs, where he lived and where there is a street called the Kirk Douglas Way. He had had a stroke a few years previous and was very frail. I would have said he had only a few months remaining. That was 20 years ago.
Kirk was a fighter on screen and off, standing side by side with Burt Lancaster at the OK Corral and doing as much as anyone in the battle against the Hollywood “blacklist”.
As producer of Spartacus he hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to pen this tale of an uprising against tyranny.
Ten years after I met Kirk in California I went to interview a little old lady called Kay Mander over lunch in Kirkcudbrightshire. She was in her mid-90s, living anonymously in a local authority bungalow, though she had been a pioneer documentary-maker during the Second World War. Suddenly out of the blue she revealed she and Kirk had been lovers.
They worked together on Heroes of Telemark half a century earlier. They were both married. For her it was a big deal, but not for Kirk. “He had this awful reputation,” she said. “He flew his ladies in first class, kept them there for a long weekend, and sent them back tourist.” It was the Kirk Douglas way. And yet Kay Mander thought he was “wonderful”. Her only regret was the pain it caused her husband. “Kirk Douglas was my passion,” she said.
Kirk appeared in a string of acclaimed classics – Spartacus, Ace in the Hole, Paths of Glory. He was great as Doc Holliday coughing up his lungs in Gunfight at the OK Corral. He was never the subtlest actor – John Kricfalusi, creator of the cartoon Ren and Stimpy, said: “He doesn’t just act with his face– he can act with his back. Kirk’s the only actor I’ve ever seen who can act with his back. They’ll have a shot of him from behind and you’ll see muscles twitching.”
Kirk was compelling too in a string of films no one has ever heard of.
I included two in my top 20 favourite obscure films when I edited the book The Times on Cinema. A Gunfight boiled the western down to a setpiece as Kirk faced off against Johnny Cash. You needed two iconic figures to make it work. And in The Last Sunset he was an outlaw who turns up on the doorstep of an old flame and discovers she has a husband and a grown-up daughter. He falls in love with the daughter, only to discover he is her father – Greek tragedy in Wild West clothing.
He could do dark. But he could also do light. He put everything into acting and into life. He was a charmer, a fighter, a legend and it seemed like he would go on forever. There was never a time he was not in my life. I was in the pub on Wednesday night enjoying a pint or two with my mate Niall and telling him Kirk was now 103. “I thought he was dead,” said Niall. It must have been right about that time that he did finally pass away. A few hours later I was looking at the news online and there it was – Kirk Douglas was dead.
I still have the dimple and the memories, but in that headline a little part of me died too.
Kirk Douglas, actor, writer, producer, director and philanthropist. Born: 9 December 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, United States. Died: 5 February 2020, Beverly Hills, California, aged 103.
With his famous cleft chin and imposing figure, Kirk Douglas could have coasted through as the archetypal action hero in films such as Spartacus. But his stubborn intensity, intelligence and relish for difficulty leave a much broader, richer legacy from a career that spanned 45 years.
Douglas never forgot his early struggles against poverty and prejudice, saying recently: “My kids never had the advantage I had. I was born poor.”
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in upstate New York in 1916. He felt rejected by his father, a huge, hard-drinking illiterate Russian immigrant who had to be a rag-and-bone man to make a living. Douglas became a caretaker to fund his studies at Saint Lawrence University, then won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met and married first wife Diana Dill.
A blossoming Broadway career was interrupted by the Second World War, when he served in the US Navy. On his return, Hollywood eagerly beckoned this strapping, angry man. His first film was The Strange Loves Of Martha Ivers (1946), which starred Barbara Stanwyck.
But he had turned down a studio contract and also refused to have plastic surgery to remove the cleft in his chin that became his trademark.
Out Of The Past (1947) and A Letter To Three Wives (1948) followed, but it was the role of a hungry boxer in Stanley Kramer’s Champion (1949) which brought him stardom and his first Oscar nomination. The 1950s saw Douglas’s fame at its height, but he eschewed the easy path to gravitate towards “son of a bitch” roles, as he put it.
A brave portrayal of artist Vincent van Gogh in Lust For Life (1956) brought a third Oscar nomination – the second was for The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) – but it would be many years before he took home a statuette.
Douglas’s string of successful and distinguished films during his heyday included Ace In The Hole (1951), 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Paths Of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Town Without Pity (1961), Lonely Are The Brave (1962) and Seven Days In May (1964).
During this time he took on the dark side of Hollywood and won, smashing the notorious Mccarthyite blacklist. In the late 1950s hundreds of artists and writers, including some star names, were exiled from America’s movie capital because of supposed Communist ties. Through his independent Bryna Company, named after his mother, Douglas hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to script Roman action movie Spartacus and publicly announced the fact. The blacklist largely fell apart.
Off-screen his egotism was not always likeable. Doris Day complained: “Kirk never makes much effort towards people. He’s pretty much wrapped up in himself.”
By the middle part of the 1960s his career was in a frustrating decline. Despite advancing years, he was unwilling to relinquish leading man status – he remained famously vain until the end. But when he let the image slip to play an old man in a nursing home in television film Amos (1985), it won him an Emmy nomination. Tough Guys (1986) saw him paired for the last time with friend Burt Lancaster in an enjoyable nostalgic romp. When it came to Greedy (1994), Douglas found himself in the ignominious position of having to audition against Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Anthony Quinn. But he was philosophical: “Last time I auditioned was 1946. But they needed to see if this old guy could still walk and talk.”
Douglas had wed second wife Anne, a Belgian-born studio executive, in 1955. His 1988 autobiography The Ragman’s Son, made it plain, though never explicit, that he was far from faithful in early years, often succumbing to the temptations his star status afforded.
But it was a cherished union that lasted until his death. Douglas had four sons: Michael and Joel from his first marriage, and from the second, Peter and Eric, who died of a drug overdose in 2004.
Kirk told Michael he should be a lawyer, and when he saw his first Shakespearean role at college, told him he was “terrible”. Bitterness and rivalry ignited when Michael, by then an established producer, passed over his father in favour of Jack Nicholson to star in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), a project Kirk had struggled to film for a decade.
“If I had known he was going to be such a famous person I would have been much nicer to him when he was young,” he said ruefully later. By the time Michael won the acting Oscar that always eluded his father, for Wall Street (1987), Douglas was filled with pride.
Writing his autobiography had started a period of introspection that softened some of Douglas’s demanding and abrasive egotism. A midair helicopter collision he was lucky to survive in 1991 hastened the process.
He sold his collection of Old Masters and gave the proceeds to charitable foundations.
He and Michael were making plans for their first film together, A Song For David, before his last illness.
In February 1996 he suffered a damaging stroke, and its ravages could clearly be seen when he accepted his lifetime achievement Oscar two weeks later. But the light still shone in his eyes as he stood tall for a standing ovation. With difficulty he said: “I see my four sons. They are proud of their old man. And I am proud, too. Proud to be part of Hollywood for 50 years.”
Douglas still wanted to make movies and had years of voice therapy which allowed him to star in 1999 film Diamonds, in which he played an old prizefighter who was recovering from a stroke. It co-starred his long-time friend from his early years, Lauren Bacall.
In 2003, his sons Michael and Joel produced It Runs In The Family, which starred various family members, including Kirk and his wife from 50 years earlier, Diana Dill. In March 2009, Douglas performed an autobiographical one-man show titled Before I Forget at the Centre Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California. The four performances were filmed and turned into a documentary.
The awards kept coming in Douglas’s later life. In 1999, he received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2002, president George Bush presented him with the National Medal of Arts award.
He also received a 2002 Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actor in a drama series for his performance in Touched By An Angel.
At 94, Douglas made an appearance at the Oscars in 2011, introducing the best supporting actress nominees.
He became a centenarian on 9 December, 2016, and later celebrated his 101st birthday.