A blog post by Film Correspondent Donald Clarke . . .
Earlier this year, we celebrated the news that Olivia de Havilland has passed her 100th birthday. She remains the only surviving top-of-the-order star from the pre-war era. Kirk Douglas deserves to be in that club, but he didn’t appear in a movie until he was 30.
The supporting appearance in The Strange Love of Marta Ivers set him up for the next half century. He hasn't appeared in a film since the gimmicky It Runs in the Family in 2003, but his powerful presence has kept the golden age alive. We thought we were about to lose him when he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1996, but it looks as if they haven't built the condition that can destroy Kirk Douglas.
Kirk was born as Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York. Both parents were from Russia and spoke Yiddish in the family home. Lives aren't lived this way in America any more. He called his autobiography The Ragman's Son and his dad was, indeed, the fellow who travelled the streets collecting trash, pans, bottles and old clothes. There doesn't seem to be an odd job that the young Kirk didn't try in his early years.
Having shown some talent for acting at school, he pointed himself in that direction and — after time as a newspaper seller, snack hawker, gardener and janitor — secured himself a scholarship at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
The war intervened and Douglas served as a communications officer in the US Navy. After discharge, he committed himself to the theatre, but his old pal Lauren Bacall reckoned he had the face for movies. She recommended him to Paramount and he was off.
We always hear that America of the post-war era was a time of suburban bliss with fridges in every kitchen, but the era's popular cinema also found space for a cynical inversion of that world. This was the era of late noir and Douglas's aquiline features and raspy voice suited the genre (and satellite productions) very nicely. Seek him out in Out of the Past and as the ultimate pushy reporter in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
Douglas ran a parallel career with Burt Lancaster and the two actors shared much in common. Both were intensely physical performers: they stood still the way others moved. Both had a style of delivery that seemed unashamed of its mannered eccentricity. They dominated the screen, but you couldn’t sincerely argue that you’d met anyone who behaved like that. (Much the same could be said of more methody actors such as Marlon Brando or James Dean.) They ended up working together on seven films.
The 1950s were his golden years. Douglas formed a company called Byrna Productions and, among other things, set about creating the legend that was Stanley Kubrick. Douglas appeared in two of the director’s films: Paths of Glory and Spartacus. For the latter film he made a decision that secured his position as an icon of liberal Hollywood.
This was 1960 and the anti-Communist witch hunts were still gripping the industry. Kirk insisted that the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who had been working under aliases, receive an onscreen credit for the picture. Many historians date the end of the McCarthy era from this point.
Next generation
Like many of his generation, he didn't quite fit in with the film-makers that began to take over in the late 1960s. In the early part of that decade, he appeared in fine pictures such as Two Weeks in Another Town (a kind of follow-up to The Bad and the Beautiful) and Lonely Are the Brave (among the great latter-day westerns), but the post-classical directors didn't find much for him to do.
He does, however, have a close connection to one of the mid-1970s most celebrated films. In 1963 Douglas bought the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and took the lead role in a successful Broadway production.
He yearned to play the part on film, but, when the time came in 1975, he was too old. Kirk passed the rights to his son, Michael Douglas, who, as producer, bagged an Oscar when the film won best picture. Kirk never took home a competitive Academy Award.
Douglas has been married for more than 60 years to his second wife He has four sons. His performances as Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life and a version of Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man with a Horn still rattle the speakers when they play on contemporary televisions.
It is a delight to write these words when the man is still alive. How remarkable it is that the stroke that initially left him mute happened a full 20 years ago. He has been living with that inconvenience for a fifth of a very long life. That experience and an earlier plane crash (good luck killing Kirk, feeble plane) led him back to the traditional Jewish faith of his upbringing.
His strong liberal beliefs remain undimmed. When Donald Trump was on the rise in September, Douglas issued an uncompromising statement. “These are not the American values that we fought in World War II to protect,” he wrote.
“I’ve also lived through the horrors of a Great Depression and two World Wars, the second of which was started by a man who promised that he would restore his country it to its former greatness.” Shut up! If anybody is allowed to compare Trump to Hitler, it is Kirk Douglas.
This is a happy day. An institution endures. Mazel tov, to you, sir. Mazel tov.
- Read this and other articles on Donald Clarke's Screenwriter blog. See also @donaldclarke63
