THE AMERICAN ACTOR KIRK DOUGLAS IS NO LONGER

The American actor Kirk Douglas died, Wednesday February 5, 2020, at the age of 103 years, announced his son Michael Douglas, on Facebook. “It is with great sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103 years. For the world, he was a legend, an actor in the golden age of cinema, (...) but for me and my brothers, Joel and Peter, he was simply a father, ”writes the actor. "Kirk has had a good life and he leaves behind films for generations to come, and the memory of a recognized philanthropist who worked for the public good and for world peace," continues Michael Douglas.

"Born in misery, you cannot go any lower"

His real name Issur Danielovitch Demsky, Kirk Douglas was born on December 9, 1916 in Amsterdam, a small town in the state of New York. Despite his miserable childhood, or perhaps because of it, this son of a Jewish ragpicker who fled Russia had eyes only for the cinema.

Kirk Douglas described himself as "an angry man."

Anger was the engine of my life, an immense anger against injustice. ” Anger against his childhood. A miserable childhood like David Copperfield, where he also suffered from anti-Semitism and the indifference of an alcoholic and illiterate father.

It was when he landed in New York for an acting career that he took Kirk Douglas as his stage name, before officially and legally adopting it just before enlisting in the navy in 1941. enlisted in the Navy during the Second World War, and made the campaign of the Pacific aboard a submarine hunter.

Birth of the Hollywood legend

Demobilized, he chained small roles before experiencing success in 1949 with Le Champion, where he camped a character boxer. Hollywood then opened its doors to him and he chained the films, a hundred in total.

The career of the actor with the azure gaze and the famous dimple in the chin takes off: adventure films (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1954), peplum (Spartacus, 1960), war films (The Paths of Glory, 1958, “, 1966), westerns (La Captive aux vies clair, 1952, Settlement of accounts at OK Corral, 1957)…

Kirk Douglas meets Vincente Minnelli, his election director. In 1952, they filmed Les Ensorcelés together, a merciless and paroxysmal representation of the black magic of cinema, which corrupts and exalts. In 1956, it was The Passionate Life of Vincent Van Gogh, "the only role in which I almost lost myself," later admitted the actor. .Kirk Douglas did not leave the character between takes, and will describe the experience as frightening, close to madness, going so far as to touch his ear to verify that it was still there. Minnelli and Douglas meet again for a fortnight elsewhere, in 1962.

Douglas may not sacrifice the techniques of the Actors Studio that Marlon Brando and James Dean imposed on Hollywood, he commits himself each time in his roles, even if it means putting himself in psychological or physical danger. He finished filming The Captive Eyes Clear (1952), Howard Hawks' bucolic western, with pneumonia. And it is he who dances on the oars of a moving longship in The Vikings.

This great friend of Burt Lancaster tours with the greatest directors, from Kubrick to Mankiewicz via Huston, Minelli, Hawks, Preminger and Kazan.

"I have long been the most hated actor in Hollywood."

He became a producer and made several films himself with the creation of his production company, Bryna, thus named in honor of his mother. This independence allows him to start work on films that are far from Hollywood "entertainment". Even The Vikings, a film with a great spectacle, in which it has for partner Tony Curtis, is distinguished by the efforts of the scriptwriters and the decorators to reach a semblance of historical truth. Kirk Douglas reserved for himself the role of the barbarian, a man who his monstrous appetites lead to his loss. In the process, he hired the young Stanley Kubrick to direct The Paths of Glory, an anti-militarist drama set in 1917.

A committed actor, who has always been close to the Democrats, he did not hesitate, in the midst of the McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s, to hire a screenwriter who was on the black list of people not to be hired because of their supposed communist sympathies. We call him "the pain". "Because of my outspokenness, I have long been the most hated actor in Hollywood."

An honorary Oscar rewarding his entire career.

Despite the glory, successes and three nominations in the 1950s, Kirk Douglas never received an Oscar during his career, much to his regret. He also confesses another great regret at the cinema: not having landed the role of Flight over a cuckoo's nest, the masterpiece of Milos Forman from 1975. “It's a tragedy for me. Nicholson got it and he got an Oscar. And I don't have one… ”. The Hollywood legend had to wait until 1996 to win an honorary Oscar for his entire career.

A successful author .

Kirk Douglas has become a successful author. He published Le Fils du chiffonnier in 1988. A best-seller in the United States, the book was translated worldwide. Douglas recounts his miserable childhood, his loves, his artistic and political struggles.

Kirk Douglas leaves behind a cinema dynasty. Two actor sons, including Michael, born of a first marriage and now at least as famous as his father, two other producer sons, an actress daughter-in-law, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and a grandson, Cameron, also an actor.

With his steel look and his square jaw, Kirk Douglas has crossed the century and genres in Hollywood. The last great sacred monster from the golden age of American cinema, it was awarded the Legion of Honor in France in 1990.

"Kirk kept his charisma as a movie star until the end of his wonderful life," wrote Steven Spielberg to the specialist magazine Hollywood Reporter, adding that he would miss his "handwritten notes, letters and fatherly advice".




Alyson Braxton for DayNewsWorld