A movie star for more than 40 years, he has rarely played it safe either as an actor, a director, or a producer. With his muscular body, throaty snarl, and trademark cleft chin, Kirk Douglas has always been an imposing presence on screen, usually best cast in action roles. Yet Kirk Douglas was never purely an action star: Some of his most memorable roles have been in contemporary urban movies where he plays ambitious, hard-edged, selfish characters who are finally redeemed (or receive their comeuppance) by film's end. That Kirk Douglas has been able to win audience sympathy for his oftentimes less than likable characters speaks volumes about the intensity of his performances.
Kirk Douglas, the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants, was born Issur Danielovitch, which was changed first to Isidore Demsky then, later, to his stage name. Because of anti-Semitism, Kirk Douglas's father could not get a job in his upstate New York hometown. Living a life of poverty, young Kirk Douglas worked his way through Saint Lawrence University as a janitor and then won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
He made his Broadway debut as a singing Western Union boy in Spring Again in the early 1940s, but when World War II intervened, Kirk Douglas enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Out of the service, he returned to the Broadway stage, where he soon came to the attention of Hollywood. His film career was launched in a lead role opposite BARBARA STANWYCK in the hit The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and his auspicious debut was followed by other meaty roles in some rather good films such as Out of the Past (1947) and A Letter to Three Wives (1948). The movie that turned him into a major star was STANLEY KRAMER's Champion (1949), in which he played a boxer who would do anything to succeed. The performance brought him his first Oscar nomination.
Immensely popular during the 1950s, Kirk Douglas was able to make a number of startlingly cynical (and honest) movies without losing his audience. Among his best, most enduring, films of that era were BILLY WILDER's The Big Carnival (1951), which also goes by the title Ace in the Hole, William Wyler's Detective Story (1951), Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for which he won a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), a classic antiwar film that the actor also produced. Kirk Douglas exhibited his range when he surprised the industry by choosing to play Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956). The film became a hit, and Kirk Douglas was vindicated with his third and final Oscar nomination.
Wanting more control over his movie projects, Kirk Douglas established his own independent film company in 1955, the Bryna Company (named for his mother). It was through the power of this successful enterprise that Kirk Douglas was able to take on and defeat the insidious Hollywood blacklist that had kept hundreds of talented people accused of left-wing or communist ties from ever working in the film industry. He did so by publicly announcing that he was hiring blacklisted screenwriter (and member of the Hollywood Ten) Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus (1960). His bold move was imitated by others and the blacklist soon crumbled.
Kirk Douglas's popularity continued to be coupled with good filmmaking throughout the early 1960s with such films as Town Without Pity (1961), Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), and Seven Days in May (1964). But after Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), his movies began to sag at the box office. Mediocre westerns, a gangster movie, and lightweight spy movies sent his career limping into the 1970s. In an attempt to turn things around, Kirk Douglas directed himself in Scalawag (1973), a western Treasure Island that tried too hard to please, and another western, Posse (1975), a highly regarded movie that flopped despite good reviews.
It is clear that Kirk Douglas owed much of his success during the earlier period of his career to having worked with many of Hollywood's top directors. Wisely attempting to repeat this strategy for success in the late 1970s, he worked with BRIAN DE PALMA in The Fury (1978) and STANLEY DONEN in Saturn 3 (1980). Neither movie caught fire at the box office.
In the early 1980s, Kirk Douglas had a sleeper hit with an Australian western, The Man from Snowy River (1982), but his opportunities in the film medium were becoming more limited. Still vigorous and unwilling to settle into character parts, he often appeared to be straining to play heroic leading men in his later movies. It was not until he played an old man in a nursing home in a TV movie called Amos (1985) that Kirk Douglas finally let go of his image. The result was a welldeserved Emmy nomination. During the 1990s Kirk Douglas appeared in four films, Oscar (1991), The Secret (1993), and Greedy (1994), the last two in major roles, and Diamonds (1999).
In The Secret, for example, he played an elderly man afflicted with dyslexia who wants to help his grandson, who has the symptoms of the same condition. Though disabled by a stroke during the 1990s, Kirk Douglas continued to be active. In Diamonds (1999), for example, he played a feisty codger recovering from a stroke (and paralleling his own recovery), who leads his son (Dan Aykroyd) and grandson on a quixotic quest in search of long-lost diamonds. Kirk Douglas also continued to write, following the publishing success of his autobiography, The Ragman's Son (1988).
He has begun to appear more regularly on TV in recent years, but the big screen was blessed with a nostalgic teaming of two old friends, Kirk Douglas and his pal BURT LANCASTER in Tough Guys (1986). It was a mediocre film, but the two gifted pros clearly delighted in working together and their pleasure was infectious. Kirk Douglas has had other pleasures in his later years, most notably in seeing his son, Michael, win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Wall Street (1987). It was a poignant moment knowing that Kirk Douglas, for all his years in Hollywood, had never taken home an Oscar of his own. In 1996, to correct their oversight, the academy presented Douglas with a "special" Oscar for a half-century of distinguished work.
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