KIRK DOUGLAS Farewell to a screen icon
WHO looks back at the glittering career of the movie legend, who died last week aged 103
Kirk Douglas – one of the last surviving links to Hollywood’s heyday – died last week, just a couple of months after celebrating his 103rd birthday. “It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” Michael Douglas said in a statement. “To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to.”
Fatal Attraction star Michael, 75, continued: “But to me and my brothers Joel and Peter he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great grandchild, their loving grandfather, and to his wife Anne, a wonderful husband.”
Born Issur Danielovitch Demsky to illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York, Kirk endured extreme poverty as a child and worked more than 40 jobs to support his family. “My father was not very affectionate, he was never interested in what
I was doing,’’ Kirk previously told WHO. “I had six sisters and no brothers and I wanted to be close to my father and he just ignored me. I’m much more demonstrative with my kids about hugging and kissing them and telling them that I love them. My father wasn’t like that.”
Kirk served in the navy until he was wounded and soon after he started acting. Appearing in more than 80 films, including the slave epic, Spartacus, Paths of Glory and Aussie classic The Man From Snowy River, twice-married Kirk became a superstar even before the term was coined. He was nominated for three Academy Awards before finally being awarded an honorary Oscar in 1996 to mark his 50 years in movies.
“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come,” Michael’s statement went on. “Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad – I love you so much and I am so proud to be your son.”
Kirk was a man of heartfelt conviction, hiring blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – and giving him full screen credit – to write Spartacus. “It was such a terrible, shameful time,” he told WHO about the purge of alleged Communist sympathisers during the 1940s and ’50s. “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.”
He continued acting well into his 90s, despite suffering a stroke in 1996 which severely damaged his voice. He hadn’t wanted Michael to follow in his footsteps. “I wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor, like many fathers,” he told WHO. “But he’s a good actor, he’s my favourite actor, but I think having a famous father was a pain in the ass for him.”
The two grew closer in recent years and Kirk adored Michael’s second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones and the couple’s two children Dylan, 19, and Carys, 16.