Spectacular screen legend
Douglas a Hollywood trailblazer
KIRK Douglas was different from other movie stars. Very different.
“I’m probably the most disliked actor in Hollywood,” he once reflected. “I was born aggressive, and I’ll die aggressive.”
In his 1950s heyday, as one of the big screen’s major drawcards and most influential talents, Douglas embodied a single-minded drive to succeed that many of his peers found unseemly.
Audiences however.
While his fellow actors saw someone who’d do anything to be get noticed, viewers recognised someone doing everything possible to make a good film great.
In the Kirk Douglas textbook, settling for second best was an admission of defeat. Creative compromise, a cinematic death sentence.
All of this in an era where characters were as simplistically black and white as the movies in which they appeared.
Douglas was one of the first knew better, of a new breed of actor who addressed each role as a search for light, shade and colour in the human experience.
To look at Kirk Douglas in his prime was to stare into a kaleidoscope of contradictions that were hard to describe, but easy to feel.
Defiant, yet insecure. Arrogant, yet vulnerable. Seemingly physically indestructible, yet possibly nearing a psychological breaking point.
The spectacular results achieved by this then-radical approach swiftly propelled Douglas to the pinnacle of his game.
For an extended period in Hollywood’s fabled Golden Age, he was a dynamically prolific, extraordinarily consistent and fiercely independent force to be reckoned with.
In just his second movie job after discharging from the US Army at the end of World War II, Douglas left a devastating impression as a shady businessman in one of the all-time great film noirs, Out of the Past.
Three years later came his breakthrough as a true leading man (and his first of three unsuccessful Best Actor Oscar nominations) as an boxer in Champion.
Across the next decade, Douglas unleashed a torrent of big box-office hits and bold artistic statements, including Young Man with a Horn, The Bad and The Beautiful, Lust for Life and Spartacus, that would seal his reputation as a genuine movie legend. ill-fated
Such was the force of this unprecedented winning streak that Douglas was able to parlay his success into his very own independent production company.
Douglas remained very proud of this trailblazing aspect of his career throughout his long and eventful life.
Not just for taking a chance on a then-unknown filmmaker who would become a giant in his field (the great Stanley Kubrick), but also for becoming the first producer to break the oppressive stranglehold of Hollywood’s infamous blacklist.
After summiting at such a high creative peak, Douglas spent the rest of his career coming down the other side of the mountain just as anyone would have expected: at his own speed, on his own terms.
There was even a notable stop at an Australian base camp during Douglas’ dignified descent towards semi-retirement, playing two roles in the international box-office hit The Man From Snowy River.
Vale Kirk Douglas.