Kirk Douglas, a movie screen legend and one of the last surviving stars from the golden age of Hollywood, passed away on February 6th at the age of 103 from natural causes. With his distinctive cleft chin and commanding physical presence, this ruggedly handsome actor brought a dynamic intensity and emotional weight with every film performance.
He was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in Amsterdam, NY, the only son of six children to Russian Jewish immigrants. The family struggled financially and he worked a variety of odd jobs throughout his childhood to help them out. Once he was a teenager, Issur decided he wanted to become an actor. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York to study acting after high school. He changed his name to "Kirk Douglas" before he joined the army during WWII. After he was medically discharged in 1944, Douglas returned to New York and found work as an actor doing commercials, radio and theater.
Lauren Bacall, who was a fellow classmate at the American Academy, would later help him get cast in his first film role with "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" in 1946 which starred Barbara Stanwyck. This would begin his remarkable film career and Douglas would appear in over eighty films including "Paths of Glory", "Ace In The Hole", "Detective Story", "Young Man With a Horn", "The Vikings", "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" and "Lonely Are the Brave". Douglas was nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar; the first was in 1950 for the boxing drama, "Champion". Three years later, he was nominated for his work in "The Bad and The Beautiful" and his final nomination was for portraying painter, Vincent Van Gogh in the 1957 biopic, "Lust For Life".
Douglas has been widely credited for helping bring an end to the Hollywood Blacklist which had prevented film professionals who were purported to have Communist sympathies from obtaining work. As he served as star and executive producer of the 1960 epic historical drama, "Spartacus", Douglas insisted that Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer, be given screen credit under his actual name for his work on the screenplay.
In 1991, Douglas was badly injured in a near-fatal helicopter crash with a small plane. This experience lead him to search for a deeper meaning in his life and re-embraced Judaism in which he had been raised. Douglas later suffered from a severe stroke in 1996 and had initially lost most of the ability to speak. After extensive therapy, he regained some speech although it was limited. Two months later, Douglas appeared on stage at the Academy Awards to accept an Honorary Oscar for "50 years as a moral and creative force in the motion picture community" and gave a moving speech.
He was married twice; Douglas first met Diana Dill when she attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with him and they married in 1943. The couple had two sons, Michael, who went on to have his own highly successful acting and producing career and Joel, a film producer. They divorced in 1951. Douglas met German producer, Anne Buydens during the filming of "Lust For Life" and they soon fell in love, marrying in 1954. They went on to have two sons, Peter, a producer and Eric who passed away in 2004 from a drug overdose. Douglas is survived by the one hundred year old, Anne and the two were married for sixty-five years.
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