Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916, and died on February 5, 2020. Kirk Douglas was an American actor, producer, director, philanthropist, and author. After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he made his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946. with Barbara Stanwyck.
Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war films. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 films. Douglas was known for his explosive acting style, which he displayed as a criminal defense attorney in Town Without Pity (1961).
Douglas became an international star through positive reception for his leading role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion (1949), which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other early films include Young Man with a Horn (1950), playing opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day, Ace in the Hole opposite Jan Sterling (1951), and Detective Story (1951), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Drama. He received a second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), opposite Lana Turner, and his third nomination for portraying Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), which landed him a second Golden Globe nomination.
Kirk Douglas A legend in his own rights
In 1955, he established Bryna Productions, producing films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In those two films, he collaborated with the then-relatively-unknown director Stanley Kubrick, taking lead roles. Lots of praise went to Douglas for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with proper on-screen credit.
Douglas produced and starred in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), considered a 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 that he purchased and later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.
As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas received three Academy Award nominations, an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an author, he wrote ten novels and memoirs. Kirk Douglas is No. 17 on the American Film Institute’s list of classic Hollywood cinema’s greatest male screen legends, the highest-ranked living person on the list until his death.
After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life. Douglas lived with his second wife (of 65 years), Anne Buydens, a producer, until his death on February 5, 2020, at age 103. A centenarian, he was one of the last surviving stars of the film industry’s Golden Age. —- gone but not forgotten
