What is Kirk Douglas famous for?

NEGI RK Sunday, January 10, 2021

What is Kirk Douglas famous for?

Why is Mr. Douglas famous? For being a big-deal movie star, for fathering Michael Douglas (another big deal movie star) and living to more than one-tenth the age of Methuselah … which would be 103 years old.

Issur Danielovitch aka Kirk Douglas.

Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in December, 1916. His father Herschel, a member of the immigrant poor who spent part of the small household income on booze, kept the large Danielovitch family (name soon changed to Demsky) chained to poverty throughout Issur’s adolescence.

Young Demsky, the only son among a half-dozen sisters, knew early on he wanted an acting career, and worked his way through St. Lawrence University, afterward attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship. He served as a Naval officer during World War II, and after service, launched his acting career in New York City with radio work and live theater.

The first time … and also the last … Kirk Douglas played a weak character on film.Within eighteen months Kirk Douglas was making The Strange Love of Martha Ivers for Hal Wallis Productions at Paramount, playing a weak husband to Barbara Stanwyck’s forceful, sinister wife. Stanwyck didn’t initially pay him much attention at first, but after days of filming told him “Hey, you’re pretty good.” The film noir proved to be a major box office success.

(Lauren Bacall … an old friend from New York .. helped him get a screen test for the role. She’d put in an endorsement of Kirk to high-powered producer Wallis, who not only tested the newcomer, but quickly signed Mr. Douglas to a contract.)

Douglas’s second film was also a noir, and today Out of the Past is considered a classic. He was second-lead to Robert Mitchum, depicting an underworld kingpin.

In 1949, Stanley Kramer’s Champion pushed Douglas to the next level of stardom. His portrayal of a ruthless boxer was Academy nominated, he received rave reviews, and Douglas found his choice of roles greatly expanded. Through the early 1950s, he worked with a steady stream of high-powered directors: for Billy Wilder there was Ace in the Hole; William Wyler directed him in Detective Story. Big Sky was a Western with Howard Hawks (Douglas wasn’t crazy about Hawks’ habit of stopping production and rewriting scenes on set; Howard Hawks thought John Wayne was a better actor.)

And Kirk Douglas collaborated for the first time with director Vincent Minnelli on Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful, Mr. Douglas basing his performance of a manipulative movie producer on David O. Selznick.

Kirk had married first wife Diana Dill in 1943. They welcomed son Michael in 1944 and son Joel in 1947 before divorcing four years afterward. Diana later said Kirk was “sexually voracious” in his pursuit of other women, and Douglas confirmed the same in his memoirs The Ragman’s Son and I Am Spartacus. But sometimes … he received a dose of karmic payback:

Kirk and Pier Angelli (1953).falling…head over heels in love with a twenty-year-old Italian actress named Pier Angeli. Or so I thought. We got engaged soon after we met. She was all that I thought about, morning, noon, and night. (Only later did I discover that while Pier might have been thinking about me in the morning, she was also thinking about several other men in the afternoon and evening.)

Douglas was the key member of a high-powered cast in Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, WDP’s first domestically produced live-action feature and the third highest-grossing film of 1954. As Douglas described his role of harpooner Ned Land: “The role gave me an ample chance to romp, strut, and carouse, but Walt made me shave off my beard. …”

James Mason, Peter Lorre, Kirk Douglas and Paul Lukas in “20k Leagues”

Throughthe late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirk Douglas stood at the commercial and creative apex of his career. He married Ann Buydens, his second wife and the woman to whom he would remain married until his death. He formed Byrna Productions (named for his mother) and within a half-dozen years produced The Vikings, Paths of Glory, and Spartacus. (Two of these features were sizable hits; box office weakling Paths of Glory as since become an anti-war classic.)

Spartacus … considered by many to be Kirk Douglas’s penultimate film … was released in October, 1960. The sandal and toga epic was directed by Stanley Kubrick … his second collaboration with Douglas … and they clashed repeatedly.

“Difficult? Kubrick invented the word. But he was talented. So, we had lots of fights, but I always appreciated his talent.”

(Kirk D. had already fired Anthony Mann after Mann helmed the opening sequence in the Sierras; the sequence remains in the film.) Spartacus went on to earn four Oscars, rake in huge grosses, and get disowned by Stanley Kubrick, since Kirk Douglas was the man in control, not Mr. Kubrick.

Kirk D. serves as the chalk board for a slave master teaching kill spots to captive slaves.

Peter Ustinov recounts the development and making of “Spartacus”; nobody does a Charles Laughton impression better.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Douglas remained a powerhouse actor-producer, but failed to make much of an impact as a director. (He tried it twice, with middling results). There were war films and Westerns, dramas and comedies, and as his box office clout declined with advancing years, he ventured into television.

Ironically, one of Douglas’s biggest financial successes came about because he couldn’t get Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, to which he owned rights, greenlit as a feature film. He turned the project over to oldest son Michael, and the resulting film garnered father and son large amounts of money.

Douglas stayed robust well into old age, overcoming injuries from a 1991 helicopter crash and then a stroke five years later. He wrote a best-selling autobiography in 1988, and more books followed. When he died at 103 in 2020, he was the second-oldest Golden Age movie star still breathing. …