Kirk Douglas - VIP Wiki Blog

Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch; December 9, 1916) is an American actor, producer, director, and author. After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he had his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s and 1960s, known for doing serious dramas, including westerns and war movies. During a sixty-year acting career, he has appeared in over 90 movies, and in 1960 was responsible for ending the Hollywood blacklist.

In 1949, after a lead role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion, for which he was nominated as Best Actor, Douglas became a star. His style of acting relied on expressing great concentration, realism, and powerful emotions, and he subsequently gravitated toward roles requiring strong characters. Among his early films were Young Man with a Horn, playing opposite Lauren Bacall (1950), Billy Wilder’s controversial Ace in the Hole (1951), and Detective Story (1951). He received a second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), where he played opposite Lana Turner. And his powerful acting as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956) is considered one of his finest roles. He is one of the last living actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In 1955 he established Bryna Productions, which began producing films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In those two films, he starred and collaborated with then relatively unknown director, Stanley Kubrick. He produced and starred in Lonely are the Brave (1962), considered a cult classic, and Seven Days in May (1964), 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 he purchased, which he later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.

As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas has received three Academy Award nominations, an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and the Medal of Freedom. As an author, he has written 10 novels and memoirs. Currently, he is No. 17 on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest male screen legends in American film history, and the highest-ranked living person on the list. After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he has focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life. He lives with Anne, his wife of over 60 years.

Early life and education

Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna “Bertha” (née Sanglel) and Herschel “Harry” Danielovitch, a businessman. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Chavusy, Mogilev Region, in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), and the family spoke Yiddish at home. His father’s brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas’ family adopted in the United States. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas notes the hardships that he, along with six sisters and his parents, endured during their early years in New York:

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.

Growing up, Douglas sold snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread to help his family. Later, he delivered newspapers and during his youth worked at more than forty different jobs before getting a job acting. 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.” In high school, after acting in plays, he then knew he wanted to become a professional actor.

Unable to afford tuition, Douglas talked his way into St. Lawrence University and received a loan which he paid back by working part-time as a gardener and a janitor. He was a standout on the wrestling team, and wrestled one summer in a carnival to make money.

Douglas’ acting talents were noticed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and he received a special scholarship. One of his classmates was Betty Joan Perske (later to become better known as Lauren Bacall), who would play an important role in launching his film career. Another classmate, and a friend of Bacall, was aspiring actress, Diana Dill, who would later become Douglas’s wife.

Bacall writes that she “had a wild crush on Kirk,” and they dated casually. During their time together, she learned that he had no money, and he once spent the night in jail as he had no place to sleep. She gave him her uncle’s old coat to keep warm: “I thought he must be frozen in the winter. . . He was thrilled and grateful.” During that period she fantasized about some day sharing her personal and stage life 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,” she later wrote.

Early career

While doing summer stock theater during a college term break, he began using the name Kirk Douglas, which he later legally adopted. He earned his first money as an actor that summer. Upon graduating from drama school, Douglas made his Broadway debut as a singing telegraph boy in Spring Again.

In 1941 he enlisted in the United States Navy, shortly after the United States entered World War II, and was medically discharged for war injuries in 1944. He married Diana Dill on November 2, 1943. They had two sons, Michael in 1944 and Joel in 1947, before they divorced in 1951.

After the war, Douglas returned to New York City and found work in radio, theater, and commercials. In his radio work, he acted in a number of network soap operas, and sees those experiences as being especially valuable, as skill in using one’s voice is important for aspiring actors, and regrets that the same avenues are no longer open to them. His stage break occurred in Kiss and Tell, which led to other roles.

Douglas had planned to remain a stage actor, until his friend, Lauren Bacall, helped him get his first film role by recommending him to director Hal Wallis, who was looking for a new male talent. Wallis’s film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), with Barbara Stanwyck, became Douglas’s debut screen appearance. He played a young, insecure man, stung with jealousy, whose life was dominated by a ruthless older woman, and he 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.

At the time the film came out, adds Thomas, movie heroes were beginning to change from those portrayed before the war. Audiences now looked for a “harder, more realistic working-man hero.” And Douglas, projecting a forceful and combative persona, exemplified the new “antihero.” He understood that portraying hard-nosed “sons-of-bitches” was an important aspect of a screen personality, and explained its value: “I’ve always tried to show how a man got that way. The guy might not be any good but you must understand him. Often, in my films, he’s a rebel against society.” Director George Stevens would later agree, when during his 1991 AFI tribute to Douglas, he stated, “His special gift had been to show us the flaws in every hero and the virtues in every heel.”

1940s

Douglas’s image as a tough guy was established in his eighth film, Champion (1949), after producer Stanley Kramer chose him to play a selfish boxer. In accepting the role, he took a gamble, however, 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. Film historian, Ray Didinger says “he 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 magazine called it “a stark, realistic study of the boxing rackets.” Douglas’s gamble paid off, with his portrayal of the ruthless boxer making him a major star. His dynamic and realistic character portrayal in the film, combined with his strong acting style, set the course for his future film career, allowing him to avoid working under the studio system and henceforth choose his own own films.

From that film on, 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, he demonstrated his independent streak and broke his studio contracts to gain total control over his projects, forming his own movie company, Bryna Productions. In 1947 Douglas made Out of the Past (in the UK it was called Build My Gallows High). He starred in this film with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Douglas made his Broadway debut in 1949 in the Anton Chekhov play Three Sisters, produced by Katharine Cornell.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Douglas was a major box office star, playing opposite some of the leading actresses of that era. He played a frontier peace officer in his first western Along the Great Divide (1951). He quickly became comfortable with riding horses and playing gunslingers, and appeared in many westerns. Douglas considers Lonely are the Brave (1962), in which he plays a cowboy trying to live by his own code, as his favorite of his own performances. The film, while respected by critics, did not do well at the box office, which Douglas attributes to poor marketing and distribution.

1950s

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 was 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,” says 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. Roger Ebert describes “Douglas’s focus and energy . . . as almost scary. There is nothing dated about [his] performance. It’s as right now as a sharpened knife.” Biographer Gene Philips notes 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.”

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 the part. . . . He was a big, big star. Gorgeous. Intense. Amazing.” 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 plays a hard-nosed film producer who manipulates and uses his actors, writers, and directors. “It’s difficult to make a movie about making movies, and to make it believable,” Douglas says. Although the film won five Academy Awards out of six nominations.

In Young Man with a Horn (1950), Douglas portrays the rise and fall of a driven jazz musician, based on real-life horn player Bix Beiderbecke. Composer-pianist Hoagy Carmichael, playing the sidekick role, added realism to the film and gave Douglas insight into the role, being a friend of the real Beiderbecke.

In one of his earliest television appearances, Douglas was a musical guest (as himself) on The Jack Benny Program (1954).

In 1955, Douglas demonstrated his independent streak and formed his own movie company, Bryna Productions, named after his mother. To do so, he had to break contracts with Hal Wallis and Warner Brothers, but then began producing his own films, as varied as Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lonely are the Brave (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), all of which he starred in.

While Paths of Glory did not do well at the box office, it has since become one of the great anti-war films, and one of early films by director Stanley Kubrick. Douglas plays a sympathetic French officer during World War I who tries to save three soldiers from the 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 major issues, one of which was Kubrick’s rewriting the screenplay without informing Douglas first. 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 distinctive acting style and delivery made him a favorite with television impersonators, such as Frank Gorshin and Rich Little.

His role as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), directed by Vincent Minnelli and based on Irving Stone’s best-seller, 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.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, with his costar, Anthony Quinn winning for Best Supporting Actor Oscar 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.” That level of passion in Douglas’s persona was also used effectively by Minnelli in The Bad and the Beautiful, four years earlier, in which Douglas was nominated for Best Actor, with the film winning five Oscars.

1960s

Douglas played the lead with an all-star cast in Spartacus (1960). He was the executive producer as well, raising the $12 million production cost, making it one of the most expensive films made up to that time. Douglas initially selected Anthony Mann to direct, but replaced him early on with Stanley Kubrick, with whom he previously collaborated in Paths of Glory.

When the film was released, Douglas gave full credit to its screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood blacklist, and thereby effectively ended it. About that event, he said, “I’ve made over 85 pictures, but the thing I’m most proud of is breaking the blacklist.” At the time, his career was at risk, with Hollywood people claiming Douglas would never get work again. “I was scared to death, but I insisted on doing it,” he said. George Clooney affirms that “in the history books, it’s marked as the moment that the Hollywood blacklist ended.”

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. He managed a similar comic turn in the western Man Without a Star (1955) and in For Love or Money (1963).

Douglas bought the rights to the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from its author, Ken Kesey. He turned it into a play in 1963 in which he starred, and it ran on Broadway for five months. Reviews were mixed. Douglas retained the movie rights, but after a decade of being unable to find a producer, gave the rights to his son, Michael. In 1975, the film version was produced by Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, and starred Jack Nicholson, as Douglas was then considered too old to play the character as written. It won five Academy Awards, including one for Nicholson.

Douglas made seven films over the decades with Burt Lancaster: I Walk Alone (1948), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Devil’s Disciple (1959), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), Victory at Entebbe (1976) and Tough Guys (1986), which fixed the notion of the pair as something of a team in the public imagination. Douglas was always second-billed under Lancaster in these movies but, with the exception of I Walk Alone, in which Douglas played a villain, their roles were more or less the same size. Both actors arrived in Hollywood at the same time, and first appeared together in the fourth film for each, albeit with Douglas in a supporting role. They both became actor-producers who sought out independent Hollywood careers.

John Frankenheimer, who directed the political thriller Seven Days in May in 1964, hadn’t worked well with Lancaster in the past, and originally didn’t want him in this one. But Douglas thought Lancaster would fit the part and “begged me to reconsider,” said Frankenheimer, and he then gave him a costarring role. “It turns out that Burt Lancaster and I got along magnificently well on the picture,” he later said.

In The Arrangement (1969), a drama directed by Elia Kazan, based upon his novel of the same title, Douglas starred as a tormented advertising executive, with Faye Dunaway as costar. The film did poorly at the box office, receiving mostly negative reviews, while Dunaway felt many of the reviews were unfair, writing in her biography, “I can’t understand it when people knock Kirk’s performance, because I think he’s terrific in the picture,” adding that “he’s as bright a person as I’ve met in the acting profession.” She says that his “pragmatic approach to acting” would later be a “philosophy that ended up rubbing off on me.”

1970s – 2000s

Between 1970 and 2008, Douglas made nearly 40 movies and appeared on various television shows.

In 1970 he starred in a western, There Was a Crooked Man…, alongside Henry Fonda. The film was produced and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. In 1973 he directed his first film, Scalawag. Also in 1973, Douglas appeared in a made-for-TV musical version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1978 he costarred with John Cassavetes and Amy Irving in a horror film, The Fury, directed by Brian De Palma.

In 1980, he starred in The Final Countdown, playing the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz, which travels through time to a day before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. It was produced by his son Peter Douglas. In 1982, he starred in The Man from Snowy River, an Australian film which received critical acclaim and numerous awards. In 1986, he reunited with his longtime costar, Burt Lancaster, in a crime comedy, Tough Guys, which included Charles Durning and Eli Wallach. In 1986, he co-hosted (with Angela Lansbury) the New York Philharmonic’s tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. The symphony was conducted by Zubin Mehta. In 1988, Douglas starred in a television adaptation of Inherit the Wind, opposite Jason Robards and Jean Simmons. The film won two Emmy Awards.

In the 1990s, Douglas continued starring in various features. Among them was The Secret in 1992, a television movie about a grandfather and his grandson who both struggle with dyslexia. That same year, he played the uncle of Michael J. Fox in a comedy, Greedy. In 1996, after suffering a severe stroke which impaired his ability to speak, Douglas still wanted to make movies. He underwent years of voice therapy and made Diamonds in 1999, in which he played an old prizefighter who was recovering from a stroke. It costarred his longtime friend from his early years, Lauren Bacall.

In 2003, his sons Michael Douglas and Joel Douglas produced It Runs in the Family, which along with Kirk starred various family members, including Michael, Michael’s son, and his wife from 50 years earlier, Diana Dill, playing his wife. In March 2009, Douglas did an autobiographical one-man show titled Before I Forget at the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California. The four performances were filmed and turned into a documentary that was first screened in January 2010.

Style and philosophy of acting

Douglas stated that the keys to acting success are determination and application: “You must know how to function and how to maintain yourself, and you must have a love of what you do. But an actor also needs great good luck. I have had that luck.” Douglas had great vitality and explained that “it takes a lot out of you to work in this business. Many people fall by the wayside because they don’t have the energy to sustain their talent.”

That attitude toward acting became evident with Champion (1949). From that one role, writes biographer John Parker, he went from stardom and entered the “superleague,” where his style was in “marked contrast to Hollywood’s other leading men at the time.” His sudden rise to prominence is explained and compared to that of Jack Nicholson’s:

He virtually ignored interventionist directors. He prepared himself privately for each role he played, so that when the cameras were ready to roll he was suitably, and some would say egotistically and even selfishly, inspired to steal every scene in a manner comparable in modern times to Jack Nicholson’s modus operandi.

As a producer, Douglas had a reputation of being a compulsively hard worker who expected others to exude the same level of energy. As such, he was typically demanding and direct in his dealing with people who worked on his projects, with his intensity spilling over into all elements of his film-making. This was partly due to his high opinion of actors, movies, and moviemaking: “To me it is the most important art form–it is an art, and it includes all the elements of the modern age.” He also stressed prioritizing the entertainment goal of films over any messages, “You can make a statement, you can say something, but it must be entertaining.”

As an actor, he dived into every role, dissecting not only his own lines but all the parts in the script to measure the rightness of the role, and he was willing to fight with a director if he felt justified. Melville Shavelson, who produced and directed Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), said that it didn’t take him long to discover what his main problem was going to be in directing Douglas:

Kirk Douglas was intelligent. When discussing a script with actors, I have always found it necessary to remember that they never read the other actors’ lines, so their concept of the story is somewhat hazy. Kirk had not only read the lines of everyone in the picture, he had also read the stage directions. . . Kirk, I was to discover, always read every word, discussed every word, always argued every scene, until he was convinced of its correctness. . . He listened, so it was necessary to fight every minute.

For most of his career, Douglas enjoyed good health and what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of energy. Much of that vitality he attributes to his childhood and pre-acting years: “The drive that got me out of my hometown and through college is part of the makeup that I utilize in my work. It’s a constant fight, and it’s tough.” His demands on others, however, were an expression of the demands he placed on himself, rooted in his youth. “It took me years to concentrate on being a human being – I was too busy scrounging for money and food, and struggling to better myself.” Actress Lee Grant, who acted with him and later filmed a documentary about him and his family, notes that even after he achieved worldwide stardom, his father would not acknowledge his success. He said “nothing. Ever.” Douglas’s wife, Anne, similarly attributes his tough childhood to the energy he devotes to acting:

He was reared by his mother and his sisters and as a schoolboy he had to work to help support the family. I think part of Kirk’s life has been a monstrous effort to prove himself and gain recognition in the eyes of his father. . . Not even four years of psychoanalysis could alter the drives that began as a desire to prove himself.

He credits his mother, Bryna, for instilling in him the importance of “gambling on yourself,” and he kept her advice in mind when making films. Bryna Productions was named in her honor. Douglas realized that his intense style of acting was something of a shield: “Acting is the most direct way of escaping reality, and in my case it was a means of escaping a drab and dismal background.”

Marriages and children

Douglas married twice, first to Diana Dill, on November 2, 1943. They divorced in 1951. The couple had two sons, actor Michael Douglas and producer Joel Douglas. Afterwards, he met German American producer Anne Buydens in Paris while acting on location in Lust for Life. She originally fled from Germany to escape Nazism and survived by putting her multilingual skills to work at a film studio, doing translations for subtitles. They married on May 29, 1954, and in 2014 they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills.

They had two sons, producer Peter Douglas and actor Eric Douglas. Eric Douglas died on July 6, 2004, of a drug overdose.

Religion and renewed spirituality

In February 1991, Douglas survived a helicopter crash in which two people died. This near-death experience sparked a search for meaning by Douglas, which led him, after much study, to embrace the Judaism in which he was raised. He documented this spiritual journey in his book Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (2001). In his earlier autobiography, The Ragman’s Son (1988), he recalled, “years back, I tried to forget that I was a Jew,” but later in his career he began “coming to grips with what it means to be a Jew,” which became a theme in his life. In an interview in 2000, he explained this transition:

Judaism and I parted ways a long time ago, when I was a poor kid growing up in Amsterdam, N.Y. Back then, I was pretty good in cheder, so the Jews of our community thought they would do a wonderful thing and collect enough money to send me to a yeshiva to become a rabbi. Holy Moses! That scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be an actor. Believe me, the members of the Sons of Israel were persistent. I had nightmares – wearing long payos and a black hat. I had to work very hard to get out of it. But it took me a long time to learn that you don’t have to be a rabbi to be a Jew.

Douglas notes that the underlying theme of some of his films, including The Juggler (1953), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), and Remembrance of Love (1982), was about “a Jew who doesn’t think of himself as one, and eventually finds his Jewishness.” The Juggler was the first Hollywood feature to be filmed in the newly established state of Israel. Douglas recalls that while there, he saw “extreme poverty and food being rationed.” But he found it “wonderful, finally, to be in the majority.” Its producer, Stanley Kramer, tried to portray “Israel as the Jews’ heroic response to Hitler’s destruction.”

Although his children had a non-Jewish mother, Douglas states that they were “aware culturally” of his “deep convictions,” and he never tried to influence their own religious decisions. Douglas’ wife, Anne, converted to Judaism before they renewed their wedding vows in 2004. Douglas celebrated a second Bar-Mitzvah ceremony in 1999 at the age of eighty-three.

Philanthropy

Douglas and his wife have donated $50 million to various non-profit causes. These have included the rebuilding of over 400 Los Angeles Unified School District playgrounds that were aged and in need of restoration. They established the Anne Douglas Center for Homeless Women at the Los Angeles Mission, which has helped hundreds of women turn their lives around. In Woodland Hills, they enlarged Harry’s Haven Alzheimer’s unit to care for patients at the Motion Picture Home. And in Culver City, they opened the Kirk Douglas Theater in 2004. They have also supported the Anne Douglas Childhood Center at the Sinai Temple of Westwood, and have established scholarship programs at Douglas’s alma mater, St. Lawrence University in New York. In March 2015, Kirk and his wife donated US$2.3 million to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Politics

Douglas and his wife, Anne, have been involved in numerous volunteer and philanthropic activities. They traveled to more than 40 countries, at their own expense, to act as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. Information Agency, speaking to audiences about why democracy works and what freedom means. In 1980 he flew to Cairo to talk with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. For all his goodwill efforts, Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Carter in 1981. Upon giving the award, Carter said that Douglas has “done this in a sacrificial way, almost invariably without fanfare and without claiming any personal credit or acclaim for himself.” In subsequent years, he has testified before Congress about abuse of the elderly.

Douglas has been a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party. He has on occasion written letters to politicians who were friends. He notes in his memoir, Let’s Face It (2007), that he felt compelled to write to former president Jimmy Carter in 2006 in order to stress that “Israel is the only successful democracy in the Middle East. . . . [and] has had to endure many wars against overwhelming odds. If Israel loses one war, they lose Israel.”

Health

In June 1996, he suffered a severe stroke, impairing his ability to speak. Doctors told his wife that unless there was rapid improvement, it was likely he would permanently lose his voice. After a long, daily, regime of voice therapy over the following months, his capacity to speak came back, but still limited. He was able to accept an honorary Academy Award in March the following year and thank the audience.

Douglas proceeded to write about this experience in a book, My Stroke of Luck, which he hoped would be an “operating manual” for others on how to handle a stroke victim in their own family.

Honors and awards

Douglas has at various times been honored by governments and organizations of other countries, including France, Italy, Portugal, Israel, and Germany.
In 1981 Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Carter.
In 1984 he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
In 1990 he received the French Legion of Honor for distinguished services to France in arts and letters.
In 1991 he received the AFI Life Achievement Award.
In 1994, Douglas’ accomplishments in the performing arts were celebrated in Washington, D.C., where he among the recipients of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
In 1999 he received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2002 he received the National Medal of Arts award from President Bush.
In October 2004, the avenue Kirk Douglas Way in Palm Springs, California was named in his honor by the Palm Springs International Film Society and Film Festival.
For his contributions to the motion picture industry, Douglas has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6263 Hollywood Blvd. He is one of the few personalities (along with James Stewart, Gregory Peck, and Gene Autry) whose star has been stolen and later replaced.

In 1996 Douglas received an Honorary Academy Award for “50 years as a moral and creative force in the motion picture community.” The award was presented by producer/director Steven Spielberg.

As a result of Douglas’s stroke the previous summer, however, in which he lost most of his speaking ability, his close friends and family were concerned about whether he should try to speak, or what he should say. Both his son, Michael, and his long-time friend, Jack Valenti, urged him to only say “Thank you,” and leave the stage. Douglas agreed. But when standing in front of the audience, he had second thoughts: “I intended to just say ‘thank you,’ but I saw 1,000 people, and felt I had to say something more, and I did.” Valenti remembers that after Douglas held up the Oscar, addressed his sons, and told his wife how much he loved her, everyone was astonished at his voice’s improvement:

The audience went wild with applause [and] erupted in affection . . . rising to their feet to salute this last of the great movie legends, who had survived the threat of death and stared down the demons that had threatened to silence him. I felt an emotional tidal wave roaring through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the L.A. Music Center.

Awards

AFI Life Achievement Award

1991 Accepted AFI Life Achievement Award

Kennedy Center Honors

1994 Honoree

Academy Awards

1996 Honorary Award for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community
1956 Lust for Life nominated for Best Actor
1952 Bad & the Beautiful nominated for Best Actor
1949 Champion nominated for Best Actor

Golden Globes

1986 Amos nominated for Best Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV
1968 Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement
1957 Lust for Life won for Best Actor-Drama
1952 Detective Story nominated for Best Actor-Drama

Emmy Awards

2002 Touched by an Angel nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series
1992 Tales from the Crypt nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
1986 Amos nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Special

Screen Actors Guild Awards

1999 Lifetime Achievement Award

BAFTA Awards

1963 Lonely are the Brave nominated for Best Foreign Actor

BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards

2009 Britannia Award for contributions to worldwide entertainment

Berlin International Film Festival

2001 Honorary Golden Bear
1975 Posse nominated for Competing Film

Cesar Awards

1980 Honorary Cesar

Hollywood Film Festival

1997 Lifetime Achievement Award

National Board of Review

1988 Career Achievement Award

New York Film Critics Circle Award

1956 Lust for Life won for Best Actor
1951 Detective Story nominated for Best Actor

In 1983, Douglas received the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

Books

Wisdom of the Elders. 1986.
The Ragman’s Son. Simon & Schuster, 1988. ISBN 0-671-63717-7.
Dance With the Devil. Random House, 1990. ISBN 0-394-58237-3.
The Gift. Warner Books, 1992. ISBN 0-446-51694-5.
Last Tango in Brooklyn. Century, 1994. ISBN 0-7126-4852-6.
The Broken Mirror: A Novella. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997. ISBN 0-689-81493-3.
Young Heroes of the Bible. Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0-689-81491-7.
Climbing The Mountain: My Search For Meaning. Simon and Schuster, 2001. ISBN 0-7432-1438-2.
My Stroke of Luck. HarperCollins, 2003. ISBN 0-06-001404-0.
Let’s Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning. John Wiley & Sons, 2007. ISBN 0-470-08469-3.
I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist. Open Road Media, 2012. ISBN 1453239375.
Life Could Be Verse: Reflections on Love, Loss, and What Really Matters Dec 2014 ISBN 9780757318474

External links

Kirk Douglas at the Internet Movie Database
Kirk Douglas at the TCM Movie Database
Kirk Douglas at the Internet Broadway Database
Kirk Douglas Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Kirk Douglas´ entries on Huffington Post
Profile at Turner Classic Movies
An Interview with Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview from November 2, 1957