Kirk Douglas

Actor

• Born: December 9, 1916
• Birthplace: Amsterdam, New York
• Died: February 5, 2020
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, CA

Actor and author

A powerful actor, Douglas also became a director and a producer. His courageous actions during the Senator Joseph McCarthy era put an end to the Hollywood blacklist.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, New York, to Herschel Danielovitch and Bryna Sanglel. His birth name was Americanized to Isadore Demsky when he went to elementary school.

Douglas was the only son of seven children; he had three older sisters and three younger sisters. His father worked as a ragman, driving a horse and wagon through town and collecting rags, metal, and junk. His father was rarely home, and Douglas’s relationship with his father was never close. Raised as an Orthodox Jew, Douglas attended Hebrew school in the afternoons after regular school.

From the time he was in kindergarten, Douglas wanted to be an actor. A high school English teacher introduced him to poetry and encouraged him to become well educated. At her urging, he sent off for college and drama school catalogs. Douglas graduated from Wilbur H. Lynch High School on June 27, 1934, in a class of 322 students. Immediately after graduation, Douglas went to work as a janitor. He held various unskilled jobs, saving money for his college education. In the fall of 1935, he enrolled at St. Lawrence University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English and graduated on June 12, 1939.

Douglas then went to New York City, where he briefly worked at the Greenwich Settlement House, putting on plays with the immigrant children in return for room and board. While in New York, he legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship. During his time in the academy’s two-year program, Douglas met his future wife, Diana Dill.

After graduating from the academy, Douglas landed a role in the play Spring Again (1941) and a bit part in Tri sestry (1901; The Three Sisters, 1920). Douglas joined the Navy during World War II and served aboard ship as a communications officer. Douglas and Dill were married on November 2, 1943, by a Navy chaplain. In June 1944, Douglas was honorably discharged. By this time the couple was expecting their first child, Michael. A second child, Joel, soon followed. The couple divorced in February 1950.

Life’s Work

After his discharge from the Navy, Douglas began to get acting jobs in New York City, including in the plays Kiss and Tell (1943) and The Wind Is Ninety (1945). In 1945, Douglas was approached by producer Hal Wallis about taking a role in a film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). After his film debut, Douglas returned to New York to act in Woman Bites Dog (1946), but the play closed within a month. Back in Los Angeles, Douglas picked up film roles in Out of the Past (1947) and I Walk Alone (1948).

From 1948 to 1952, Douglas did some radio work in dramas and series, including The Prudential Family Hour of Stars and Suspense. In 1949, he made Champion, a film about a boxer, which propelled him into stardom and landed him his first Academy Award nomination. Douglas then signed a contract with Warner Bros. Studio, where he made several films, including Along the Great Divide (1951), which was his first Western film, and The Big Trees (1952), which was the last film he made for Warner Bros. Douglas played the role of sailor Ned Land in Walt Disney’s first live-action film, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954). While filming it, Douglas married his second wife, Anne Buydens, on May 29, 1954. The couple had two children, Peter Vincent and Eric.

In 1955, Douglas formed his own production company and named it Bryna Productions in honor of his mother. At that time, it was unusual for an actor to be involved in production or in directing. Nevertheless, Douglas acted, directed, and produced; Bryna’s first film, The Indian Fighter, was made in 1955, and it starred Douglas. Bryna Productions was also active in television, producing several series.

Douglas made Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), which are perhaps the best-known films of his career. Spartacus, a film adaptation of a book by the same name, was also Douglas’s first film as a producer. In the 1970s, he began directing some of his own films, starting with Posse (1975).

In 1963, Douglas went to Colombia to represent the United States at a film festival. Between 1964 and 1966, he and his wife traveled abroad as goodwill ambassadors on behalf of the State Department and the United States Information Agency, visiting the Far East, Europe, the Middle East, and the Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe.

In 1981, Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his public service efforts, followed by the Jefferson Award in 1983. He was a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. He received the American Cinema Award in 1987, the German Golden Kamera Award in 1988, and the National Board of Review’s Career Achievement Award in 1989. Nominated three times for an Academy Award for best actor, Douglas received an honorary Academy Award in 1995. In 1999, he was given the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Douglas’s autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, was published in 1988, and it was followed by three other nonfiction books, two children’s books, and three novels. In 1991, he survived a collision between his helicopter and a small plane. Recovering from the accident, he kindled a renewed interest in Judaism and began to study the Talmud and the Torah again. A minor stroke in 1996 left him without the ability to speak for some time, but Douglas fully recovered. He continued to be involved in civic and community affairs.

Douglas's last acting parts were in the father-son films It Runs in the Family (2003) and Illusion (2004); It Runs in the Family also starred other members of Douglas's own family, including son Michael, grandson Cameron, and ex-wife Diana. He and his family were also the subject of a 2009 documentary, Before I Forget.

In the years following his stroke, Douglas became prolific in his writing. He penned several memoirs and autobiographical works, including Climbing the Mountain (1997) and A Stroke of Luck (2002), and Let's Face It (2007). In 2014, Douglas also published a volume of poetry titled Life Could Be Verse. Four years later, he made one of his last public appearances when he took the stage at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony to help present one of the trophies. He died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on February 5, 2020, at the age of 103.

Significance

Douglas was one of the most widely recognized screen actors of the twentieth century. During his career, spanning more than sixty years, he appeared in more than eighty films and nine plays. Douglas brought a great deal of energy and strength to the characters that he portrayed, who were often powerfully driven men in difficult circumstances. Douglas also worked as a director and a producer, adding his creative energies to the filmmaking experience. Douglas opposed the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which sought to find Communists and other subversives, especially in the Hollywood community. Douglas defied the blacklist, on which the names of suspected Communists were kept, and used Dalton Trumbo’s real name on the film credits for Spartacus. This act is credited with having brought an end to the Hollywood blacklist. Douglas's 2012 memoir I Am Spartacus offers a behind-the-scenes account of the making of the film and of Douglas's decision, and the 2015 biopic Trumbo pays tribute to that historic move.

In 1964, Douglas and his wife established the Douglas Foundation, a philanthropic institution dedicated to the idea of helping people who cannot help themselves. Its causes are educational and medical research.

Bibliography

Berkvist, Robert. "Kirk Douglas, a Star of Hollywood's Golden Age, Dies at 103." The New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/movies/kirk-douglas-dead.html. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

Douglas, Kirk. The Ragman’s Son: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Douglas, Kirk. Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Douglas, Kirk. Let’s Face It: Ninety Years of Living, Loving, and Learning. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2007.

Hammond, Pete. “Kirk Douglas on ‘Trumbo’: ‘I Was Threatened That Using a Blacklisted Writer Would End My Career.’” Deadline. Penske Business Media, 19 Nov. 2015. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

“Kirk Douglas: My Spartacus Broke All the Rules.” Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, n.d. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Munn, Michael. Kirk Douglas: The Man, the Actor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Thomas, Tony. The Films of Kirk Douglas. New York: Citadel Press, 2000.