A creative and moral force
KIRK Douglas was the dimplechinned screen icon who was known for bringing an explosive, clenchedjawed intensity to an array of heroes and heels in films such as Spartacus and Champion, and for his offscreen role as a maverick independent producer who helped end the Hollywood blacklist.
He died on February 5, aged 103.
Douglas, who continued to act occasionally after surviving a stroke in 1996, 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’’, son Michael Douglas said.
‘‘Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come.’’
The stagetrained Douglas earned the first Oscar nomination of his long acting career playing one of the post-World 2 era’s antiheroes: the ruthlessly ambitious boxer in the 1949 drama Champion.
He later received Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama The Bad and the Beautiful and as tormented artist Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 biographical drama Lust for Life.
‘‘I like a role that is stimulating, challenging, interesting to play,’’ Douglas wrote in The Ragman’s Son, his bestselling 1988 autobiography. ‘‘That’s why I’m often attracted to characters that aren’t likeable.’’
Never a fan of the Hollywood studio system — he likened the standard sevenyear studio contract to slavery — Douglas launched his own production company in 1955.
Named after his immigrant mother, the Bryna Co produced a number of films in which Douglas starred, including director Stanley Kubrick’s landmark antiwar film, Paths of Glory, The Vikings and Spartacus. Douglas’ Joel Productions, named after one of his sons, also produced Seven Days in May and Lonely Are the Brave.
As executive producer of Spartacus, Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving suppressed writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name for his work on the 1960 Roman Empire epic.
In acknowledgement of a career that spanned more than 60 years and more than 80 films, Douglas was honoured late in life with numerous awards: The American Film Institute’s life achievement award, a Kennedy Centre honour, a Screen Actors Guild life achievement award and an honorary Oscar for his ‘‘50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community’’.
‘‘He’s one of the legendary figures of his era,’’ said Wesleyan University film studies department chair Jeanine Basinger.
‘‘He wasn’t a traditional leading man, really, in looks, and yet he had an unmistakable charisma and power on screen — not just the glamour of the movie star, though he did have that, but real acting chops. So you knew he was going to be a star.’’
The only son of seven children of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, New York. (The family later changed its name to Demsky, and young Issur was renamed Isadore — a name he said he always hated and which prompted a nickname that he hated even more: Izzy.)
As a child, he developed an early sense of the direction his life might take.
‘‘I have always wanted to be an actor, I believe from the first time I recited a poem in kindergarten about the Red Robin of Spring. They applauded. I liked that sound. I still do,’’ he wrote in his autobiography.
He was unable to afford college after graduating from high school in 1934, so worked in a department store for a year and played John Barrymore in a little theatre production of The Royal Family.
Thanks to a college loan, he was accepted to St Lawrence University in Canton, where he earned a varsity letter for wrestling and was elected president of the student body. He worked as a janitor during the school year. Over the summers he worked in a steel mill and wrestled in carnivals.
After graduating in 1939, young Isadore Demsky was performing at the Tamarack Playhouse when he adopted a more marqueesuitable name: Kirk Douglas.
He then moved to New York City, and was accepted on a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
During his two years there, Douglas began dating fellow acting student Diana Dill; they later married and had two sons, Michael and Joel. He also became friends with another academy student: Betty Bacall, who, as Lauren Bacall, would later help set his Hollywood career in motion.
After graduating from the academy in 1941, Douglas did summer stock in a theatre in Pennsylvania. Later that year, he made his Broadway debut as a singing Western Union messenger in Guthrie McClintic’s production of Spring Again.
‘‘Then,’’ he later recalled, ‘‘we got into the war, and I married Diana, and all bets were off for the duration.’’
After serving in the navy during World War 2, Douglas replaced Richard Widmark in the Broadway comedy Kiss and Tell. He had a few more brief appearances on Broadway before receiving a call from Hollywood.
Unbeknown to Douglas, Bacall had recommended him to producer Hal Wallis, who offered him a role in a movie he was producing starring Barbara Stanwyck.
Douglas made his film debut as the weakwilled, alcoholic husband of the heiress played by Stanwyck in the 1946 melodrama The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
Parts in a halfdozen films followed, and then came his Oscarnominated starring role as ambitious fighter Midge Kelly in Champion.
In early 1949 — five months before the film’s release — Douglas’ wife sued him for divorce. In his book, Douglas said he had been unfaithful. She died in 2015 at the age of 92.
In 1954, Douglas married Anne Buydens. They had two sons, Peter and Eric.
Of forming his own production company in 1955, Douglas once said he ‘‘didn’t want to be a mogul, but I wanted to have more say in what I would do’’.
One of his most ambitious productions was Spartacus.
In bringing the Howard Fast novel to the screen, Douglas and his company secretly hired the blacklisted Trumbo to write the screenplay. Trumbo had spent 10 months in federal prison for refusing to cooperate with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1947.
Like some other blacklisted writers, Trumbo continued to write under pseudonyms or have other writers ‘‘front’’ for him. With Spartacus, Douglas defied the blacklist.
In his 2012 memoir I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist, Douglas said producer Edward Lewis served as the ‘‘front’’ for Trumbo after they brought the project to UniversalInternational Pictures.
However, both Douglas and Lewis felt deeply about ‘‘the injustice of the blacklist’’. During production of the film in 1959, Douglas told Trumbo that once the film was in the can, ‘‘not only am I going to tell them that you’ve written it, but we’re putting your name on it’’.
For defying the blacklist, Douglas was attacked by the American Legion, which urged its members to boycott Spartacus. He also incurred the wrath of Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, who told her readers that Spartacus was ‘‘written by a Commie and the screen script was written by a Commie, so don’t go see it’’.
In 1963, after buying the dramatic rights to Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Douglas returned to Broadway.
The play, which Douglas produced and starred in as the irrepressible Randle P McMurphy, who feigns insanity to get out of doing work while in prison and is sent to a mental institution, closed two months after it opened. It was one of the biggest disappointments of Douglas’ career.
After Douglas unsuccessfully tried for years to interest movie studios in a film version of Cuckoo’s Nest with him as the star, Douglas’ son Michael asked to have a chance at setting up the movie. Michael took it over, and he and Saul Zaentz produced the 1975 smash hit directed by Milos Forman that swept the Oscars with Jack Nicholson in the starring role.
In addition to Michael, Douglas’ three other sons also followed him into show business. Peter and Joel became producers. Eric, who became an actor and standup comic and had a history of drug and alcohol problems, died at age 46 in 2004 of what authorities said was an accidental overdose.
Beginning in 1963, Douglas served as an ambassador of goodwill, travelling around the world for the State Department and the United States Information Agency.
In 1981, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. Two years later, he received the Jefferson Award for his public service; he later received the French Legion of Honour.
For Douglas, the 1990s proved to be a decade of both triumph and struggle.
In 1991, he suffered a severe back injury in a helicopter accident, and in early 1996 he suffered a stroke.
At first, the stroke, which affected his speech, threw him into a deep depression — but he began pulling out of his depression some weeks later, he said, when his family persuaded him to accept an honorary Oscar.
Stepping on stage at the Academy Awards, he was greeted by a standing ovation.
Over the years, Douglas and his wife, Anne, were involved in numerous charitable projects, including establishing a foundation that built playgrounds for children throughout Los Angeles and Israel, making significant gifts to CedarsSinai Medical Centre and providing funds for an Alzheimer’s unit at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills.
A $2.5 million donation by the couple also kicked off fundraising for the Centre Theatre Group’s 300seat theatre that was constructed from the framework of an old Culver City movie house. The Kirk Douglas Theatre opened in 2004.
In 2009, at the age of 92, he returned to the stage at his namesake theatre for an autobiographical sketch. When he turned 100, his son Michael expressed his admiration for how his father had dealt with losing a son, surviving a helicopter crash, and recovering from a stroke.
‘‘One of the things that I find most incredible about Dad,’’ he said, ‘‘is the third act of his life.’’