From rags to Hollywood riches
Intense, rugged and muscular, with only his famous dimpled chin to suggest an underlying vulnerability, Kirk Douglas, who has died aged 103, was a towering figure in Hollywood in the postwar era, and one of the last surviving links to its so-called Golden Age, said The New York Times. From 1946, he appeared in around 90 films, but unusually for a leading man of his stature, he rarely played romantic leads. Instead he specialised in “tough sons of bitches”. Douglas was himself a “born fighter”. Driven, abrasive and confident, he overcame extreme poverty and defied anti-Semitism, stood up to the studio system, and survived a series of debilitating strokes, not to mention a helicopter crash, to establish himself as a living legend. Although he never won an acting Oscar, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was justly proud of having helped to end Hollywood’s communist blacklist, by insisting the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo be named in the credits for his epic 1960 film Spartacus. His friends had warned him it could end his career, and later he mused that he’d probably not have stuck his neck out had he been older, “but I was young enough to say to hell with it”.
Born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York state, in 1916, Kirk Douglas was the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish at home. His childhood was desperately poor. His father, he recalled, was a ragman – which even in their poor neighbourhood, put him on the “lowest rung on the ladder” – and anti-Semitism was rife in the mainly Wasp town. “Kids on every street corner beat you up,” he wrote in his 1988 autobiography The Ragman’s Son. But Douglas wouldn’t be beaten up for long. Even as a boy he stood up to bullies: he recalled that the bravest thing he ever did was flicking a teaspoon full of hot tea at his tyrannical father; and though never a tall man (only 5ft 9in), he was a talented wrestler in his youth – and by his teens, was already attractive to women. He lost his virginity to his English teacher, aged 15. “I realise she could have gone to jail for it, but she got me interested in poetry,” he said. It was at high school that he decided to become an actor.
Determined to get on in life, he hitchhiked to St. Lawrence University, and talked the dean into admitting him. Although rejected from the fraternities for being Jewish, he was elected student president. He then won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, by which time he had given himself a Waspy new name, Kirk Douglas. There, he made a lifelong friend in Betty Joan Perske, who would later change her name too, to Lauren Bacall. In her memoir, she recalled that he was so poor at that time, she gave him her uncle’s coat to keep warm. His first wife was their fellow student Diana Dill. They married in 1943 – by which time he was serving in the navy – and had two children, Michael and Joel, before divorcing in 1951. An inveterate womaniser, Douglas would go on to have affairs with several of his leading ladies: surrounded by beautiful women, he was “like a kid in the candy store”, he said. However, he claimed to have been true to his second wife, Anne Buydens, “in my fashion”. Having married in 1954, they had two sons: Eric, who died of an accidental drugs overdose in 2004, and Peter.
Douglas was invalided out of the services in 1944, and returned to New York. He was starting to make his name as a stage actor when Bacall – who was already in Hollywood – recommended Douglas to the producer Hal B. Wallis. In 1946, he made his film debut in The Strange Life
of Martha Ivers. He excelled in the role of a mother-dominated weakling, but it was playing a ruthless boxer in
Champion, in 1949, that made his name. It won him his first of three Oscar nominations. One critic described his performance as “alarmingly authentic”. After that, his preference would always be for characters who were hard-edged, and even nasty, said The Guardian. “I don’t find virtue photogenic,” he said. “What is it to be a nice guy? To be nothing, that’s what. A big fat zero with a smile for everybody.”
In Billy Wilder’s 1951 film Ace in the
Hole he played a callous newspaper reporter preying on the misery of a man trapped in a collapsed mine, while in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), he was a manipulative Hollywood producer, rumoured to have been based on David O. Selznick. “A shit, but such an interesting guy,” he said of the character. “I’m probably the most disliked guy in Hollywood,” Douglas once said of himself. “And I feel pretty good about it as that’s me.”
In 1956, however, he was a surprisingly convincing Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, a departure from type that earned him a rebuke from John Wayne. “Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that?” he demanded. “There’s so goddam few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers.” Douglas later revealed that it was one of the only times he ever felt in danger of being subsumed by a role. In 1957, he worked with Stanley Kubrick on the anti-war classic Paths of Glory. In 1960, he hired Kubrick to direct
Spartacus, which was made by Bryna, the production company he had by then founded (and named after his mother). About a defiant escaped slave, it contains the famous line
“I am Spartacus”. Through Bryna, Douglas also bought the rights to Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. In 1963, Douglas played its lead role of McMurphy in a Broadway production, but he struggled to get a film version made. Eventually he gave the rights to his son Michael, who cast Jack Nicholson in the role his father had craved. The film won five Oscars in 1976 – including best actor for Nicholson.
“What’s is it to be a nice guy? To be nothing, that’s what. A big fat zero with
a smile for everybody”
After that, Douglas appeared in only a handful of films, but he wrote several memoirs (one of which was called I am Spartacus!), and a bestselling novel. He rediscovered his Jewish faith after being badly injured in a helicopter crash in 1991. In 1996, he suffered a severe stroke, which left him unable to speak, and near suicidal. However, weeks later he was well enough to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars and deliver a short speech about his 50 years in the business. In later life, he strove to become a better father and a better husband, said The Times. He also became one of Hollywood’s most generous philanthropists: he gave away some $35m to various causes, selling some of his art collection to fund his foundation. He took a particular interest in a mentoring scheme he funded for troubled teenagers, which involved each one being given a $500 cheque on graduating from high school. He insisted on handing over these himself, in person.