Kirk Douglas
Douglas played an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion (1949), which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other early films include Out of the Past (1947); Young Man with a Horn (1950), playing opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day; Ace in the Hole (1951); and Detective Story (1951), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.
He received his second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), opposite Lana Turner, and earned his third for portraying Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), a role for which he won the Golden Globe for the Best Actor in a Drama. He also starred with James Mason in the adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), a large box-office hit.
In September 1949 at the age of 32, he established Bryna Productions, which began producing films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In those two films, he collaborated with the then relatively unknown director Stanley Kubrick, taking lead roles in both films. Douglas arguably helped to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit.
He produced and starred in Lonely Are the Brave (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), the latter opposite Burt Lancaster, with whom he made seven films. In 1963, he starred in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a story that he purchased and later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.
Douglas continued acting into the 1980s, appearing in such films as Saturn 3 (1980), The Man from Snowy River (1982), Tough Guys (1986), a reunion with Lancaster, and in the television version of Inherit the Wind (1988) plus in an episode of Touched by an Angel in 2000, for which he received his third nomination for an Emmy Award.
As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas received an Academy Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an author, he wrote ten novels and memoirs. After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life.
He lived with his second wife, producer Anne Buydens, until his death in 2020 at the age of 103. A centenarian, Douglas was one of the last surviving stars of the film industry's Golden Age.
Early life and education
Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, New York, the fourth of seven children and the only son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel; 1884–1958) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch (1884–1954). His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants from Chavusy, Mogilev Governorate, in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus).
The family spoke Yiddish at home. His six sisters included Freida "Fritzi" Demsky Becker and Ida Sahr. Douglas reconnected to the Jewish religion after a near-fatal helicopter crash at the age of 74.
Douglas's uncle used the surname Demsky (Russian: Демский), and Douglas's family adopted the same surname in the United States. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and altered his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the United States Navy during World War II.
In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son, Douglas notes the hardships that he and his family endured during their early years in Amsterdam:
My father, who had been a horse trader in Russia, got himself a horse and a small wagon, and became a ragman, buying old rags, pieces of metal, and junk for pennies, nickels, and dimes ... Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman's son.
Douglas had an unhappy childhood, living with an alcoholic, physically abusive father. While his father drank up what little money they had, Douglas and his mother and sisters endured "crippling poverty".
Douglas first wanted to be an actor after he recited "The Red Robin of Spring", a poem by the English poet John Clare, while in kindergarten and received applause. Growing up, he sold snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread to help his family. He later delivered newspapers, and he had more than forty jobs during his youth before becoming an actor.
He found living in a family with six sisters to be stifling: "I was dying to get out. In a sense, it lit a fire under me." After appearing in plays at Amsterdam High School, from which he graduated in 1934, he knew he wanted to become a professional actor. Unable to afford the tuition, Douglas talked his way into the dean's office at St.
Lawrence University and showed him a list of his high school honors. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1939. He received a loan which he paid back by working part-time as a gardener and a janitor. He was a standout on the school's wrestling team and wrestled one summer in a carnival to make money.
Douglas's acting talents were noticed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, which gave him a special scholarship. One of his classmates, Betty Joan Perske, later known as Lauren Bacall, played an important role in launching his film career. Bacall wrote that she "had a wild crush on Kirk", and they dated casually.
Another classmate, and a friend of Bacall's, was aspiring actress Diana Dill, who would later become Douglas's first wife.[citation needed]
During their time together, Bacall learned Douglas had no money and that he once spent the night in jail since he had no place to sleep. She once gave him her uncle's old coat to keep warm: "I thought he must be frozen in the winter ... He was thrilled and grateful." Sometimes, just to see him, she would drag a friend or her mother to the restaurant where he worked as a busboy and waiter.
He told her his dream was to someday bring his family to New York to see him on stage. During that period she fantasized about someday sharing her personal and stage lives with Douglas, but would later be disappointed: "Kirk did not really pursue me. He was friendly and sweet—enjoyed my company—but I was clearly too young for him," the eight-years-younger Bacall later wrote.
Career
Rise to stardom
Douglas joined the United States Navy in 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War II, where he served as a communications officer in anti-submarine warfare aboard USS PC-1139. He was medically discharged in 1944 for injuries sustained from the premature explosion of a depth charge. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant (junior grade).
After the war, Douglas returned to New York City and found work in radio, theater, and commercials. In his radio work, he acted in network soap operas and saw those experiences as being especially valuable, as skill in using one's voice is important for aspiring actors; he regretted that later the same avenues became no longer available.
His stage break occurred when he took over the role played by Richard Widmark in Kiss and Tell (1943), which then led to other offers.
Douglas had planned to remain a stage actor until his friend Lauren Bacall helped him get his first film role by recommending him to producer Hal B. Wallis, who was looking for a new male talent. Wallis's film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck became Douglas' debut screen appearance.
He played a young, insecure man stung by jealousy, whose life was dominated by his ruthless wife, and who hid his feelings with alcohol. It would be the last time that Douglas portrayed a weakling in a film role. Reviewers of the film noted that Douglas already projected qualities of a "natural film actor", with the similarity of this role with later ones explained by biographer Tony Thomas:
His style and his personality came across on the screen, something that does not always happen, even with the finest actors. Douglas had, and has, a distinctly individual manner. He radiates a certain inexplicable quality, and it is this, as much as talent, that accounts for his success in films.
In 1947, Douglas appeared in Out of the Past (UK: Build My Gallows High), playing a large supporting role in this classic noir thriller starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Douglas made his Broadway debut in 1949 in Three Sisters, produced by Katharine Cornell. The month after Out of the Past was released, I Walk Alone, the first film teaming Douglas with Burt Lancaster, presented Douglas playing a supporting part quite similar to his role in Out of the Past in another classic fast-paced noir thriller.
Douglas' image as a tough guy was established in his eighth film, Champion (1949), after producer Stanley Kramer chose him to play a selfish boxer. However, in accepting the role, he took a gamble, since he had to turn down an offer to star in a big-budget MGM film, The Great Sinner, which would have earned him three times the income. Melvyn Douglas played the third-billed (above the title) part Kirk Douglas passed on. The Great Sinner flopped.
Film historian Ray Didinger says Douglas "saw Champion as a greater risk, but also a greater opportunity ... Douglas took the part and absolutely nailed it." Frederick Romano, another sports film historian, described Douglas's acting as "alarmingly authentic":
Douglas shows great concentration in the ring. His intense focus on his opponent draws the viewer into the ring. Perhaps his best characteristic is his patented snarl and grimace ... he leaves no doubt that he is a man on a mission.
Douglas received his first Academy Award nomination, and the film earned six nominations in all. Variety called it "a stark, realistic study of the boxing rackets."
After Champion he decided that, to succeed as a star, he needed to ramp up his intensity, overcome his natural shyness, and choose stronger roles. He later stated, "I don't think I'd be much of an actor without vanity. And I'm not interested in being a 'modest actor'". Early in his Hollywood career, Douglas demonstrated his independent streak and broke his studio contracts to gain total control over his projects, forming his own movie company, Bryna Productions (named after his mother) in September 1949.
Peak years of success
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Douglas was a major box-office star, playing opposite some of the leading actresses of that era. He portrayed a frontier peace officer in his first western, Along the Great Divide (1951). He quickly became very comfortable with riding horses and playing gunslingers, and he appeared in many Westerns.
He considered Lonely Are the Brave (1962), in which he plays a cowboy trying to live by his own code, his personal favorite. The film, written by Dalton Trumbo, was respected by critics but did not do well at the box office due to poor marketing and distribution.
In 1950, Douglas played Rick Martin in Young Man with a Horn, based on a novel of the same name by Dorothy Baker based on the life of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Composer and pianist Hoagy Carmichael, a friend of the real Beiderbecke, played the sidekick, adding realism to the film and giving Douglas insight into the role.
Doris Day starred as Jo, a young woman who was infatuated with the struggling jazz musician. This was strikingly opposite of the real-life account in Doris Day's autobiography, which described Douglas as "civil but self-centered" and the film as "utterly joyless". During filming, bit actress Jean Spangler disappeared, and her case remains unsolved.
On October 9, 1949, Spangler's purse was found near the Fern Dell entrance to Griffith Park in Los Angeles. There was an unfinished note in the purse addressed to a "Kirk," which read: "Can't wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away". Douglas, married at the time, called the police and told them he was not the Kirk mentioned in the note.
When interviewed via telephone by the head of the investigating team, Douglas stated that he had "talked and kidded with her a bit" on set, but that he had never been out with her. Spangler's girlfriends told police that she was three months pregnant when she disappeared, and scholars such as Jon Lewis of Oregon State University have speculated that she may have been considering an illegal abortion.
In 1951, Douglas starred as a newspaper reporter anxiously looking for a big story in Ace in the Hole, director Billy Wilder's first effort as both writer and producer. The subject and story were controversial at the time, and U.S. audiences stayed away. Some reviews saw it as "ruthless and cynical ... a distorted study of corruption, mob psychology and the free press." Possibly it "hit too close to home", said Douglas.
It won a Best Foreign Film award at the Venice Film Festival. The film's stature has increased in recent years, with some surveys placing it in their Top 500 Films list. Woody Allen considers it one of his favorite films. As the film's star and protagonist, Douglas is credited for the intensity of his acting. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "his focus and energy ... is almost scary.
There is nothing dated about Douglas' performance. It's as right-now as a sharpened knife." Biographer Gene Philips noted that Wilder's story was "galvanized" by Douglas's "astounding performance" and no doubt was a factor when George Stevens, who presented Douglas with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1991, said of him: "No other leading actor was ever more ready to tap the dark, desperate side of the soul and thus to reveal the complexity of human nature."
Also in 1951, Douglas starred in Detective Story, nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Lee Grant in her debut film. Grant said Douglas was "dazzling, both personally and in the part. ... He was a big, big star. Gorgeous. Intense. Amazing." To prepare for the role, Douglas spent days with the New York Police Department and sat in on interrogations.
Reviewers recognized Douglas's acting qualities, with Bosley Crowther describing Douglas as "forceful and aggressive as the detective".
In The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), another of his three Oscar-nominated roles, Douglas played a hard-nosed film producer who manipulates and uses his actors, writers, and directors. In 1954 Douglas starred as the titular character in Ulysses, a film based on Homer's epic poem Odyssey, with Silvana Mangano as Penelope and Circe, and Anthony Quinn as Antinous.
In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Douglas showed that in addition to serious, driven characters, he was adept at roles requiring a lighter, comic touch. In this adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, he played a happy-go-lucky sailor who was the opposite in every way to the brooding Captain Nemo (James Mason).
The film was one of Walt Disney's most successful live-action movies and a major box-office hit. Douglas managed a similar comic turn in the western Man Without a Star (1955) and in For Love or Money (1963). He showed further diversity in one of his earliest television appearances. He was a musical guest (as himself) on The Jack Benny Program (1954).
In 1955, Douglas was finally able to get his film production company, Bryna Productions, off the ground. To do so, he had to break contracts with Hal B. Wallis and Warner Bros., but he began to produce and star in his own films, starting with The Indian Fighter in 1955. Through Bryna, he produced and starred in the films Paths of Glory (1957), The Vikings (1958), Spartacus (1960), Lonely are the Brave (1962), and Seven Days in May (1964).
In 1958, Douglas formed the music publishing company Peter Vincent Music Corporation, a Bryna Productions subsidiary. Peter Vincent Music was responsible for publishing the soundtracks of The Vikings and Spartacus.
While Paths of Glory did not do well at the box office, it has since become one of the great anti-war films, and it is one of director Stanley Kubrick's early films. Douglas, a fluent French speaker, portrayed a sympathetic French officer during World War I who tries to save three soldiers from facing a firing squad.
Biographer Vincent LoBrutto describes Douglas's "seething but controlled portrayal exploding with the passion of his convictions at the injustice leveled at his men." The film was banned in France until 1976. Before production of the film began, however, Douglas and Kubrick had to work out some large problems, one of which was Kubrick's rewriting the screenplay without informing Douglas first.
Kubrick and writer Jim Thompson had added a happy ending to the film to make the film more commercial to the general public, where the men's lives are saved from execution at the last minute by the general. However, these changes were reversed back more closely to the original novel at the demand of Kirk Douglas. It led to their first major argument: "I called Stanley to my room ...
I hit the ceiling. I called him every four-letter word I could think of ... 'I got the money, based on that [original] script. Not this shit!' I threw the script across the room. 'We're going back to the original script, or we're not making the picture.' Stanley never blinked an eye. We shot the original script.
I think the movie is a classic, one of the most important pictures—possibly the most important picture—Stanley Kubrick has ever made."
Douglas played military men in numerous films, with varying nuance, including Top Secret Affair (1957), Town Without Pity (1961), The Hook (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), Heroes of Telemark (1965), In Harm's Way (1965), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), Is Paris Burning (1966), The Final Countdown (1980), and Saturn 3 (1980). His acting style and delivery made him a favorite with television impersonators such as Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, and David Frye.
His role as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), directed by Vincente Minnelli and based on Irving Stone's bestseller, was filmed mostly on location in France. Douglas was noted not only for the veracity of van Gogh's appearance but for how he conveyed the painter's internal turmoil. Some reviewers consider it the most famous example of the "tortured artist" who seeks solace from life's pain through his work.
Others see it as a portrayal not only of the "painter-as-hero", but a unique presentation of the "action painter", with Douglas expressing the physicality and emotion of painting, as he uses the canvas to capture a moment in time.
Douglas was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, with his co-star Anthony Quinn winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Paul Gauguin, van Gogh's friend. Douglas won a Golden Globe award, although Minnelli said Douglas should have won an Oscar: "He achieved a moving and memorable portrait of the artist—a man of massive creative power, triggered by severe emotional stress, the fear and horror of madness." Douglas himself called his acting role as Van Gogh a painful experience: "Not only did I look like Van Gogh, I was the same age he was when he committed suicide." His wife said he often remained in character in his personal life: "When he was doing Lust for Life, he came home in that red beard of Van Gogh's, wearing those big boots, stomping around the house—it was frightening."
In general, however, Douglas's acting style fit well with Minnelli's preference for "melodrama and neurotic-artist roles", writes film historian James Naremore. He adds that Minnelli had his "richest, most impressive collaborations" with Douglas, and for Minnelli, no other actor portrayed his level of "cool": "A robust, athletic, sometimes explosive player, Douglas loved stagy rhetoric, and he did everything passionately." Douglas had also starred in Minnelli's film The Bad and the Beautiful four years earlier, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Financial troubles
For approximately 15 years and 27 films, Douglas's agent had been Sam Norton, who was compensated with 10% of Douglas's gross earnings. In addition, Norton was partners with Jerome "Jerry" B. Rosenthal in the law firm of Rosenthal & Norton which received an additional 10%. On the day of his wedding in 1958 his bride Anne had been quietly pulled aside by Norton and been presented by Norton (without Kirk Douglas's knowledge) with a pre-nuptial agreement.
She signed the document, but Douglas, because he held Norton as both his best friend and a father figure, was unwilling to get involved in his wife's subsequent attempts to obtain a copy. Anne Douglas went behind her husband's back, engaging lawyer Greg Bautzer and suing to obtain a copy from Norton successfully. Her distrust of Norton grew, especially as he had been granted power of attorney, and she found that the pre-nuptial agreement meant that she and their children had no claim on Douglas's estate until they had been married for five years.
She could also find no documentation to prove Norton's assertion that Douglas was a millionaire. Her suspicions were further aroused when the Broadway play A Very Special Baby for which Norton had convinced Douglas to guarantee financing, closed after only a week. She shared her concerns first with Greg Bautzer and then Edward Lewis who advised her to hire Price Waterhouse to investigate her husband's finances.
Douglas returned from filming The Devils Disciple in England in late 1958, and was presented with the results of Price Waterhouse's audit which detailed that the 18 months he had recently spent overseas on the advice of Norton did not qualify for a tax-free income break, that the investments he had been advised to make in fact had been channeled through dummy companies owned by his agent.
As a result, Douglas had no money and owed the IRS $750,000. Douglas engaged a new lawyer and was able to get Rosenthal & Norton to give up their rights to any interest in his latest film The Vikings and any of his future income. Norton was dismissed as his agent, but as he had put nearly all of his assets in his wife's name, Douglas was only able to recover $200,000 from him.
The profits from The Vikings allowed Douglas to pay off his IRS debt, with his financial future now dependent on the success of Spartacus.
Spartacus and mid-career
In 1960, Douglas played the title role in what many consider his career-defining appearance as the Thracian gladiator slave rebel Spartacus with an all-star cast in Spartacus (1960). He was the executive producer as well, which increased the $12 million production cost and made Spartacus one of the most expensive films up to that time.
Douglas initially selected Anthony Mann to direct, but replaced him early on with Stanley Kubrick, with whom he had previously collaborated in Paths of Glory.
📚 Source: Wikipedia
