Kirk Douglas, the son of a ragman who channeled a deep, personal anger through a chiseled jaw and steely blue eyes to forge one of the most indelible and indefatigable careers in Hollywood history, died Wednesday. He was 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” son Michael Douglas said in a statement obtained by People magazine. “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.”
Douglas walked away from a helicopter crash in 1991 and suffered a severe stroke in 1996 but, ever the battler, he refused to give in. With a passionate will to survive, he was the last man standing of all the great stars of another time.
Nominated three times for best actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — for Champion (1949), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Lust for Life (1956) — Douglas was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1996. Arguably the top male star of the post-World War II era, he acted in more than 80 movies before retiring from films in 2004.
The father of two-time Oscar-winning actor-director-producer Michael Douglas, the Amsterdam, New York native first achieved stardom as a ruthless and cynical boxer in Champion. In The Bad and the Beautiful, he played a hated, ambitious movie producer for director Vincente Minnelli, then was particularly memorable, again for Minnelli, as the tormented genius Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award for best actor.
Perhaps most importantly, Douglas rebelled against the McCarthy Era establishment by producing and starring as a slave in Spartacus (1960), written by Dalton Trumbo, making the actor a hero to those blacklisted in Hollywood. The film became Universal’s biggest moneymaker, an achievement that stood for a decade.
Offscreen, Douglas had a reputation for being demanding during his heyday in the ’50s and ’60s. But there were other sides to him as well: a political activist, charity benefactor, family man, a funny and thoughtful storyteller and an author.
Douglas is credited with helping break the 1950s blacklist when he insisted that Dalton Trumbo (one of the Hollywood 10) be credited for his screenplay on the film “Spartacus.” (Trumbo had written a number of scripts during the ’50s, but always under pseudonyms. Douglas insisted on WGA arbitration to get Trumbo credit in 1960, while earlier that year, Otto Preminger announced that Trumbo had scripted “Exodus.”) Douglas was honored by the ACLU with a Bill of Rights Award “for having the courage and conviction to break the infamous Hollywood blacklist and forcing the full recognition of one of its victims.”
Born Issur Danielovitch (later changed to Demsky) in Amsterdam, N.Y., Douglas was the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In his autobiography “The Ragman’s Son,” he described the abject poverty in which he was raised. “Even on Eagle Street, the poorest section of town … the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman’s son.”
With help from loans and scholarships, Douglas attended St. Lawrence U., where, between wrestling matches, he took an interest in dramatics. He worked odd jobs after college — usher, professional wrestler, soda jerk — to pay his way through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It was at AADA that he met Diana Dill, who became his first wife and the mother of sons Michael and Joel.
After working in summer stock, Douglas made his Broadway debut in 1941 as a singing Western Union messenger in “Spring Again.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter & Variety