Kirk Douglas
Hollywood legend who played the tough guy in war films and Westerns but was also at home portraying more complex characters
KIRK DOUGLAS, the actor, who has died aged 103, was a towering figure in Hollywood’s postwar golden age, the lanternjawed star of more than 80 films such as Gunfight at the OK Corral, Paths of Glory and Spartacus; only his dimpled chin provided a note of vulnerability in an otherwise rugged physique.
While on screen he suffered an alarming level of physical punishment – losing an eye in The Vikings (1958), smashing his ribs in The Indian Fighter (1954) and being crucified in Spartacus (1960) – all that was artifice: in reality, too, Douglas frequently diced with death, narrowly missing a real arrow shot at him while filming The Indian Fighter, surviving a five-day coma after a fight scene in Light At the Edge of the World (1971), a heart attack in 1989, a helicopter crash two years later and a stroke a few years after that.
During his heyday in the early 1950s, a stream of high-octane roles perfectly matched his abrasive personality and booming voice. In Billy Wilder’s mordant satire Ace in the Hole (1951) he was horribly authentic as the tabloid journalist who thinks nothing of prolonging a man’s suffering to keep a human interest story in the headlines.
Detective Story, made in the same year, gave him an opportunity to rant and rave as a cop under pressure from a beleaguered New York police station. In The Bad and Beautiful (1952), one of his most eye-catching roles, he was ideally cast as a Hollywood producer who would sacrifice anyone – director, author, lover or friend – for next year’s Academy Award.
In real life, however, when it came to the Oscars, Douglas was passed over, not taken seriously enough as an actor despite the quality of his early work, until in 1996 he was finally given an Oscar for lifetime achievement.
His son Michael – with whom he engaged in a bitter competitive relationship – won two Oscars, as a producer of the 1975 hit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and as an actor in Wall Street (1987), where he played the kind of ruthless wheeler-dealer Kirk Douglas himself might have played a generation earlier.
But then Douglas’s life and career involved a constant battle between star-struck delusion and reality, at least until he was well into middle age.
When filming one of his most personable roles, in the Bahamas, the sailor Ned Land in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he claimed: “I met a beautiful young woman in a temple where they had sacrificed virgins. Then she and I climbed the steps of a pyramid that was devoted to the worship of genitalia. On the top of the pyramid, she became a worshipper.”
Even by Hollywood standards, Douglas was sexually promiscuous and boastful. However, his glamorous escorts, such as Rita Hayworth, Patricia Neal, Gene Tierney and Joan Crawford, were not always impressed. “It’s wonderful that you shaved your armpits,” Crawford told him after his success in the boxing picture Champion (1949).
On the Italian set of Ulysses (1953), even the dog found it difficult to give Douglas the degree of devotion which its legendary forebear had shown for Homer’s character, which he was playing. It took a dislike to him on sight, constantly snubbed him on camera and had to be drugged into submission. The dog’s indifference to the film was later echoed by many critics.
The son of an illiterate, alcoholic Russian Jewish immigrant who became a rag-and-bone man, he was born Issur Danielovich Demsky on December 9 1916 at Amsterdam, an industrial town in upstate New York. He was the only son in a family of six daughters. By the age of 10 he was selling soft drinks to local millworkers, though he was blackballed as a paper boy and regularly beaten up because of his religion.
His first appearance on stage, aged six, was as the shoemaker in The Shoemaker and the Elves at East Main Street School. Later, he revealed that this had introduced him to the powerful effect of drama when a teacher tried to seduce him in an English class. After graduating he worked as a school janitor, bellboy and assistant in a department store before going to St Lawrence University at Canton, New York.
Douglas claimed that he managed to persuade the college authorities to grant him a loan after telling his family: “I want to find my green isle in the sea.” But later he commented: “Horseshit had always played an important part in my life. I arrived at college reeking of it.”
To help supplement his income he became partner to a wrestler known as “The Mighty Marvel”. He also chose a new name after pondering a series of less glamorous alternatives such as “Norman Dems”.
After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in June 1941, Douglas landed small parts on Broadway, first as a singing telegram, then as an echo in The Three Sisters (1942), before being drafted into the United States Navy. After training at the Notre Dame Midshipman School in South Bend, Indiana, he served as a communications officer in a patrol boat in the Pacific. In November 1943 he married the British actress Diana Dill, daughter of the attorney-general of Bermuda.
Douglas got his first major postwar acting break at the recommendation of his friend Lauren Bacall, in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), where he gave an impressive performance as Barbara Stanwyck’s alcoholic husband.
He then sealed his future in pictures with I Walk Alone, the first of several collaborations with Burt Lancaster, and Joe Mankiewicz’s enduring A
Letter to Three Wives, in which he excelled, against type, as a sensitive schoolteacher.
Douglas’s efforts in more intellectually demanding pieces, such as Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) and The Glass Menagerie (1950), were frequently disappointing. But there was little doubt about the force of his screen performances, which fizzled with an energy that threatened to turn into searing hatred: his flair for depicting villains was shown early on in the role of the smoothly lethal gangster Whit Sterling in Jacques Tourneur’s classic film noir Out of the Past (1947).
The unease Douglas engendered seemed to be confirmed by his tendency to become involved in on-set mishaps; in one scene of Champion (1949), where he played the boxer Midge Kelly, he really was knocked unconscious.
At the same time his ambition went with an obsessive concern for reputation, which made him leap to his own defence when silence would have been wiser. He once went on Russian radio after making Ulysses to deny a scurrilous Soviet calumny that “Mr Douglas was so impressed with the script that he asked if Mr Homer had written any others”.
Douglas had a taste for radically changing scripts and shooting plans which drove directors to the edge of their tolerance. When making Gunfight at the OK Corral in the spring of 1956, he stayed up all night with Burt Lancaster, rewriting his dialogue in an attempt to override John Sturges.
Lancaster later explained in mitigation that they both came from humble beginnings, and were young and arrogant. “Kirk would be the first person to tell you he’s a difficult man”, Lancaster continued, “and I would be the second.”
By the mid-1950s Douglas was able to begin producing his own pictures. The Bryna company, named after his mother, produced the Western Man Without a Star (1955), directed by King Vidor. Most notable was Lust for Life (1956), Vincente Minnelli’s rendering of Irving Stone’s bestseller about Vincent van Gogh. Sporting a beard, Douglas certainly bore a physical resemblance to the painter, and with his raging intensity proved a better choice for the part than Spencer Tracy would have been in an MGM adaptation planned a decade earlier.
Douglas was also a tireless promoter of some distinguished projects, most notably One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Bryna’s best production was probably Paths of Glory (1957), an uncompromising anti-war drama about the trumped-up court martial of three French soldiers in the First World War.
Douglas gives a finely modulated performance as Colonel Dax, who sees his men scapegoated after a failed operation, and the film was superbly directed by Stanley Kubrick, a man for whom Douglas initially had great admiration, though he later scaled this down after working with him on Spartacus in 1959: Kubrick was, by then, “a talented shit”.
This was possibly a judgment reached after a long morning’s filming, during which (as the actress Jean Simmons recalled) it took “forever” to get the crucified slave up on his cross. Once safely installed, she remembered, “the assistant director called lunch and left him up there. You have to have a sense of humour in this industry.”
Among the more interesting films he made at the start of the 1960s were Richard Quine’s contemporary melodrama on marital infidelity, Strangers When We Meet (1960), in which Douglas’s architect embarks on an affair with his neighbour Kim
Novak, and he played a modern cowboy in Lonely are the Brave (1962).
Through the rest of that decade and into the 1970s, Douglas kept himself busy with Westerns and war films: among the better ones were Town Without Pity, The Last Sunset, Seven Days in May, The War Wagon. Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) was an all-star action picture set during the 1948 Arab-israeli war.
He directed two films: Scalawag (1973) was Treasure Island repurposed as a Western, with Douglas billed as “Long John Silver and Jesse James rolled into one”; he enjoyed more success with Posse two years later as a self-serving US marshal in pursuit of Bruce Dern’s bank robber.
As he grew older, Douglas turned towards self-parody in the roles he chose. In Home Movies (1979) he played an egocentrically comic star, and in Greedy (1994) he was Michael J Fox’s crafty uncle.
Old age was not kind to Douglas, but he accepted what he received. After a first stroke he published a novel, Dance with the Devil (1990), which was inevitably described as a “roman à cleft”, and wrote an autobiography, The Ragman’s Son (1988), which proved an unusually frank and readable bestseller by Hollywood standards. He was involved in a helicopter crash, which left him with broken ribs and some severe guilt feelings about the two young pilots killed.
In 1995, a few months before he was awarded the Oscar for lifetime achievement, Douglas suffered a massive stroke, and Diana Dill, to whom he was married between 1943 and 1950, published a memoir describing him as a “sexually voracious bird of prey” with a fondness for hallucinogenic drugs and orgies.
Although the stroke left his speech impaired, Douglas recovered sufficiently to write My Stroke of Luck (2000). He described in it first the feeling of helplessness, which seemed so much worse after a lifetime playing self-sufficient tough guys, and then the shock at seeing his ravaged face in the mirror, all of which was followed by a new appreciation of “the gift of life”.
But after nearly 60 years of wedlock – he married his second wife, Anne Buydens, in 1954 – he still claimed to have one of Hollywood’s happiest marriages. “If cheating husbands admitted what was going on and apologised, their wives would be more willing to forgive and forget,” he explained reassuringly. After years of ignoring his religion, he went through a traditional bar mitzvah for the second time at the age of 84.
Kirk Douglas was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, by President Carter, and more recently he was appointed to the Légion d’honneur.
Douglas is survived by his wife Anne and three sons: Michael, the actor, and the producers Joel and Peter; another son, Eric, died in 2004 of a drugs overdose.
Kirk Douglas, born December 9 1916, died February 5 2020