NY TIMES
Kirk Douglas, one of the last surviving movie stars from Hollywood’s golden age, whose rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence who was instantly recognizable: the jutting jaw, the dimpled chin, the piercing gaze and the breaking voice. In his heyday Mr. Douglas appeared in as many as three movies a year, often delivering critically acclaimed performances. In his first 11 years of film acting, he was nominated three times for the Academy Award for best actor.
He was known for manly roles, in westerns, war movies and Roman-era spectacles, most notably “Spartacus” (1960). But in 80 movies across a half-century he was equally at home on mean city streets, in smoky jazz clubs and, as Vincent van Gogh, amid the flowers of Arles in the south of France.
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| “I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of van Gogh,” he wrote. “Not only did I look like him, I was the same age he had been when he committed suicide.” The experience was so frightening, he added, that for a long time he was reluctant to watch the film.
“While we were shooting,” he said, “I wore heavy shoes like the ones van Gogh wore. I always kept one untied, so that I would feel unkempt, off balance, in danger of tripping. It was loose; it gave him — and me — a shuffling gait.”
Early on Mr. Douglas created a niche for himself, specializing in characters with a hard edge and something a little unsavory about them. His scheming Hollywood producer in “The Bad and the Beautiful” was “a perfect Kirk Douglas-type bum,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote.
Mr. Douglas did not disagree. “I’ve always been attracted to characters who are part scoundrel,” he told The Times in an interview in 1984. “I don’t find virtue photogenic.”
Yet he often managed to win audiences’ sympathy for even the darkest of his characters by suggesting an element of weakness or torment beneath the surface.
“To me, acting is creating an illusion, showing tremendous discipline, not losing yourself in the character that you’re portraying,” he wrote in his best-selling autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son” (1988). “The actor never gets lost in the character he’s playing; the audience does.”
Douglas was proud of his muscular physique and physical prowess and regularly rejected the use of stuntmen and stand-ins, convinced he could do almost anything the situation required. 
Preparing for “Champion,” he trained for months with a retired prizefighter. He took trumpet lessons with Harry James for “Young Man With a Horn” (although James did the actual playing on the film’s soundtrack). He became a skilled horseman and learned to draw a six-shooter with impressive speed, lending authenticity to his Doc Holliday when he and Lancaster, as Wyatt Earp, blazed away at the Clanton gang in the final shootout in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957).
He was born Issur Danielovitch on Dec. 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, N.Y., a small city about 35 miles northwest of Albany. As he put it in his autobiography, he was “the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants in the WASP town of Amsterdam,” one of seven children, six of them sisters. By the time he began attending school, the family name had been changed to Demsky and Issur had become Isadore, promptly earning him the nickname Izzy.
The town’s mills did not hire Jews, so his father, Herschel (known as Harry), became a ragman, a collector and seller of discarded goods. “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,” Mr. Douglas wrote. “And I was the ragman’s son.”
A powerful man who drank heavily and got into fights, the elder Demsky was often an absentee father, letting his family fend for itself.
Money for food was desperately short much of the time, and young Izzy learned that survival meant hard work. He also learned about anti-Semitism. “Kids on every street corner beat you up,” he wrote.
Mr. Douglas once estimated that he had held down at least 40 different jobs — among them delivering newspapers and washing dishes — before he found success in Hollywood. After graduating from high school, he hitchhiked north to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and was admitted and given a college loan.
He became a varsity wrestler there and, despite being rejected by fraternities because he was Jewish, was elected president of the student body in his junior year — a first for the St. Lawrence campus.
By that time he had decided that he wanted to be an actor. He got a summer job as a stagehand at the Tamarack Playhouse in the Adirondacks and was given some minor roles. He traveled to New York City to try out for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and performed well, but he was told no scholarships were available.
It was at the Tamarack, the summer after he graduated from college, that he decided to change his name legally to something he thought more befitting an actor than Isadore Demsky. (When he chose Douglas, he wrote, “I didn’t realize what a Scottish name I was taking.”)
Returning to New York, he studied acting for two years, played in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1941 as a singing Western Union messenger in “Spring Again.”
The next year he enlisted in the Navy and was trained in antisubmarine warfare. After being injured in an accidental explosion, Mr. Douglas was discharged from the Navy in 1944. He returned to New York and did some stage work.
It was his widely praised performance in The Wind Is Ninety that brought him to Hollywood’s attention. The year was 1946, and, at the suggestion of Lauren Bacall, producer Hal Wallis invited him to come to California for a screen test. Wallis was so impressed with Douglas that he cast him in the lead opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).
His voice could be heroic, threatening, sardonic, merciless, epic or self-loathing – but it seldom meddled in the ordinary.
Douglas was seen to great advantage as the villain in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), a man whose every smile seemed a more reliable portent of rage and violence.
For a few years, he was tricky to cast, not quite hero or villain. But in 1949, he seized on the role of the ruthless boxer in Champion. This was an unreservedly nasty guy, redeemed only by his energy, his winning and his flawless determination. The movie’s script (by Carl Foreman) was meant as a warning about boxing, corruption and even ambition itself, but Douglas made the man a pioneer to later raging bulls, and he deserved his best actor Oscar nomination.
More important, Champion defined his star quality as a grinning villain, a rough-edged hero or a driven careerist.
Over the next few years, he had the roles that established him. As the trumpet player in Young Man With a Horn (1950), supposedly inspired by Bix Beiderbecke (and dubbed by Harry James), he handled the horn in the way gangsters held guns.
Over the next two years, he was a western hero facing a desert ordeal in Along the Great Divide;
the vicious, manipulative reporter in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole;
a neurotic cop having a breakdown in Detective Story;
a Howard Hawks hero in The Big Sky;
and then Shields in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful.He got another Oscar nomination for his depiction of Shields, that flamboyant, conniving rascal of charm, a figure allegedly based on the Gone With the Wind producer David O Selznick,
. There could as easily have been nominations for Detective Story or Ace in the Hole,
In Detective Story (1951), directed by William Wyler, Douglas gives a grandstanding star turn in a melodrama set in a police station, playing the vindictive, violent McLeod, an officer with an awful secret.
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.
"Kirk retained his movie star charisma right to the end of his wonderful life, and I'm honored to have been a small part of his last 45 years," Steven Spielberg said in a statement. "I will miss his handwritten notes, letters and fatherly advice, and his wisdom and courage — even beyond such a breathtaking body of work — are enough to inspire me for the rest of mine."
I defied my agents to make Champion rather than appear in an important MGM movie they had planned for me [The Great Sinner, which wound up starring Gregory Peck]. Nobody had ever heard of the people connected to Champion, but I liked the Ring Lardner story, and that’s the movie I wanted to do. Everyone thought I was crazy, of course, but I think I made the right decision.”
Never one to toe the line with synthetic, movie star-type parts, Douglas played classic heels in a number of films. In 1951, he showed a keen flair for portraying strong-minded characters like the sleazy newspaper reporter in Billy Wilder’s The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) and the sadistic cop in William Wyler’s Detective Story. He played more sympathetic types in Out of the Past (1947), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) as Doc Holliday, Paths of Glory (1957) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1963).
Douglas was very particular in his role selection. “If I like a picture, I do it. I don’t stop to wonder if it’ll be successful or not,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I loved Lonely Are the Brave and Paths of Glory, but neither of them made a lot of money. No matter; I’m proud of them.”
His independent nature led him in 1955 to form his own independent film company, Bryna Productions. In the post-World War II era, Douglas was the first actor to take control of his career in this manner. Captaining his own ship, he soon launched a number of heady projects. Most auspiciously, he took a risk on a young Stanley Kubrick with Paths of Glory and Spartacus, films that feature two of Douglas’ finest performances. (He hired Kubrick for the latter after firing Anthony Mann a week into production.)
“We all had been employing the blacklisted writers,” Mr. Douglas wrote in a 2012 memoir, “I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist.” “It was an open secret and an act of hypocrisy, as well as a way to get the best talent at bargain prices. I hated being part of such a system. The movie’s popularity has been long lasting. It was restored and rereleased in 1991. The profits from the movie made Douglas a multi-millionaire.
Mr. Douglas made many more films in the years ahead, but none quite lived up to his work of the 1950s and early ’60s. There were more westerns: “The Way West” (1967), with Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark; “There Was a Crooked Man ...” (1970), with Henry Fonda; and “A Gunfight” (1971), with Johnny Cash. “Tough Guys” (1986), a comedy, was the last movie he made with Burt Lancaster.
There were more military roles. He was a Marine colonel who foils an antigovernment plot in “Seven Days in May,” a 1964 Cold War thriller that also starred Lancaster.By then he could add that statuette to his other lifetime awards: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Jimmy Carter just days before Mr. Carter left office in 1981, and a Kennedy Center Honors award, presented in 1994 by President Bill Clinton.
During a Tonight Show appearance in August 1988 to promote his first book, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas told Johnny Carson that he often drew from personal experience for his work on film.
“What I found out when I wrote this book is I have a lot of anger in me,” he said. “I’m angry about things that happened many, many years ago. I think that anger has been a lot of the fuel that has helped me in whatever I’ve done.”
In 1966, on behalf of the State Department, Douglas visited six Iron Curtain countries: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. He often regaled acquaintances about a visit to Yugoslavia, where he managed a private visit with President Tito, much to the chagrin of the British ambassador who had been waiting for weeks for such an opportunity.
When the baffled British ambassador asked Douglas how he’d managed it, he replied, “Mr. Ambassador, how many movies have you made?” Realizing that a Hollywood star was in a unique position to enter domains beyond even established professionals, he sagely used his celebrity status to meet important people from all walks of life.
Quite soon he was working with some of the best writers and directors — Wyler, Wilder, Hawks, Tourneur, Mankiewicz, Walsh — and he also exhibited shrewd instincts for juggling sure-fire commercial fare and riskier ventures, a trait he shared with fellow New Yorker and tough customer Burt Lancaster; their paths were to cross later on.
he is engaging — even when he’s singing to a seal — in Disney’s huge 1954 hit 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He starred in quite a few Westerns and seems to have been partial to the genre; some of his better ones include The Indian Fighter, Man Without a Star, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The War Wagon, There Was a Crooked Man and Posse, which he also directed, in 1975.
One personal favorite that deserves far more attention than it gets is Strangers When We Meet, an exceptionally insightful and moving melodrama of adultery in a very real Los Angeles starring Douglas and Kim Novak, both in peak form in 1960.
“Years ago I was at the bedside of my dying mother, an illiterate Russian peasant. Terrified, I held her hand. She opened her eyes and looked at me. The last thing she said to me was, ‘Don’t be afraid, son, it happens to everyone.’ As I got older, I became comforted by those words.”
Olivia de Havilland is still with us, at 104, and actor Norman Lloyd is 105, but Douglas was the last of the great studio-era male stars to make it this far into the 21st century. With his passing, the end of a major chapter in the history of Hollywood can be marked not with a period but with an exclamation point.
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