The Full Biography
Kirk Douglas. Actor. Producer. The ragman’s son who made intensity a leading-man style and then put Dalton Trumbo’s name on a title card.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is the chin, the dimple like a maker’s mark, a slave standing up in the dust and a hundred men standing with him. Sometimes it is van Gogh’s bandaged ear, or a French colonel who will not shoot his own soldiers to please a general. What the still cannot show is Issur Danielovitch of Amsterdam, New York, born to a Russian-Jewish ragman, who took the name Kirk Douglas on the way to the Navy, who never had a second profession in mind, and who lived long enough to write the life down after a stroke had tried to take the voice.
He was born on December 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, a mill town in the Mohawk Valley. His father, Herschel, called Harry, had come from the old country and made a living from rags and junk. His mother was Bryna. There were seven children. He was the only son. The first pressure was hunger with a schedule: the cart, the cold, the English that had to be learned in the street. He sold snacks to mill workers. He wrestled. He decided, early, that the body could be an argument. St. Lawrence University took him. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in New York, trained him. A classmate, Betty Perske — Lauren Bacall before the marquees — told the producer Hal Wallis to look at him. That is a useful origin: not a discovery lunch, a classmate’s sentence.
He was Izzy Demsky in the neighborhood. He became Kirk Douglas as the war came up. The Navy took him in World War II; he served in anti-submarine work and came home with a medical discharge. Broadway held him in 1941 and again after the service. The door to pictures was The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin. He was not the lead. He was the man you could not stop watching. Out of the Past (1947) made the same point in a different coat. Then Champion (1949), a cheap boxing picture directed by Mark Robson. He played Midge Kelly as if decency were a rumor. The Academy nominated him for Best Actor. A low-budget prizefighter had made him a star. He did not waste the nomination on gratitude. He used it as leverage.
What he did with the leverage is the career. Ace in the Hole (1951), for Billy Wilder — a reporter who will let a man stay buried if the story is good. Detective Story the same year, for William Wyler. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for Vincente Minnelli, a Hollywood producer with no usable kindness; a second Oscar nomination. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), for Disney, proof he could grin without losing the voltage. Then the performances the serious rooms still assign. Lust for Life (1956), van Gogh for Minnelli, a third nomination, the loss to Yul Brynner for The King and I. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) with Burt Lancaster. And Paths of Glory (1957), for a young Stanley Kubrick: Colonel Dax in the trenches, a man who will not dress up a court-martial as honor. Douglas wanted Kubrick. He also wanted the picture to say what it said. That combination — star will, director nerve — is the method he would take into the next one.
In 1955 he formed Bryna Productions and named it for his mother. That is not a sentimental footnote. It is how a ragman’s son took the means of production. Bryna made The Vikings (1958), Spartacus (1960), Lonely Are the Brave (1962) — the modern cowboy he called his favorite — and Seven Days in May (1964). He hired Kubrick again for Spartacus after Anthony Mann left. He played the slave who would not stay a slave. The “I am Spartacus” sequence is the civic clip. The civic act was on the card at the front of the picture.
Virtue is not photogenic.Kirk Douglas
Dalton Trumbo had been writing under other names because the blacklist said he could not write under his own. Douglas insisted the Spartacus credit read Dalton Trumbo. Otto Preminger announced the same credit for Exodus that same year, and announced it first. Spartacus reached theaters first. Douglas did not end the blacklist by himself. He was a public wedge, a star who could afford the fight and chose to spend the credit on another man’s name. Trumbo walked onto a lot. The town, which had liked its fear, had to look at a title card. That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the shout in the dust, not a writer’s name in Roman letters.
Between the prestige parts he took the work that paid for Bryna. Young Man with a Horn (1950), opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day, is a jazz picture about a man who cannot stop. Howard Hawks’s The Big Sky (1952) put him on a river. The Juggler (1953), a Holocaust survivor in the new state of Israel, is a Jewish American star using the company named for his mother on a story the studios still treated as difficult. Ulysses (1954) was shot in Italy. The Indian Fighter (1955) was Bryna’s first. The Vikings (1958), with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, is a loud popular hit that funded the serious ones. He never confused the loud hit with the civic act. He used one to buy the other.
The years after the Roman epic were not a cooling. Bryna kept him in pictures he could own. Lonely Are the Brave (1962), from Edward Abbey’s novel, put him on a horse against helicopters — a last cowboy he called his favorite part. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) sent him back to Minnelli and to a ruined star. John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) is a puzzle with guest faces. Seven Days in May (1964), with Burt Lancaster and Fredric March, is a coup picture for a country that had just buried a president: Douglas as a Marine colonel who will not let the Joint Chiefs steal an election. Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965) put him in Navy khaki opposite John Wayne. Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) made him a Jewish-American officer in the 1948 war. The War Wagon (1967) was a paycheck Western with Wayne that he treated as work, not a reunion.
He took the other chair. Scalawag (1973) and Posse (1975) are director credits, the second a revisionist Western in which a marshal is worse than the man he hunts. Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978) and The Man from Snowy River (1982) kept the jaw in the frame when the town had begun to treat him as furniture. The civic honors arrived while the body was still bargaining. The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. The AFI Life Achievement Award in March 1991, weeks after a helicopter went down at Santa Paula on February 13: two other people dead, himself walking away. The Kennedy Center Honors in 1994. He had already published The Ragman’s Son in 1988. Novels followed — Dance with the Devil, The Gift, Last Tango in Brooklyn. He was not a movie star dabbling. He was a man who had decided the page could hold what a close-up would not.
He kept the intensity into middle age: Lonely Are the Brave, which he loved more than the public did; political pictures; the long tail of a star who refused to become furniture. Three competitive Oscar nominations. No competitive win. An honorary Academy Award in 1996 would have to do, and it arrived in the hardest year of the private file. He had already survived a helicopter crash on February 13, 1991, at Santa Paula, two other people dead, himself walking away. In January 1996 a stroke took part of his speech. In March he accepted the honorary Oscar with the voice that remained. Michael, the son who had become the other famous Douglas, was in the room. The town stood up for a man who had to work to finish a sentence. He had always worked to finish a sentence.
Six things most people never knew
- Issur Danielovitch was the birth name; Izzy Demsky was the neighborhood. Kirk Douglas was a wartime invention, not a studio’s first idea.
- Lauren Bacall sent him to Hal Wallis. They had been classmates at the Academy. A woman’s sentence opened the door.
- Bryna is his mother. The company that produced Spartacus is a ragman’s wife, spelled in lights.
- He did not break the blacklist alone. Preminger named Trumbo on Exodus the same year. Douglas was the loud star on the picture that landed first.
- Two people died in the 1991 crash he walked away from. The survival is not a stunt. It is a fact he carried into the books.
- He wrote that acting was never a second choice. No fallback profession. The intensity was not a style. It was the only trade.
He married Diana Dill in 1943. Their sons are Michael, born in 1944, and Joel. The marriage ended in 1951. In 1954 he married Anne Buydens, a publicist he met in Paris, and stayed married to her for the rest of his life. Their sons were Peter and Eric. Eric died in 2004. Anne outlived Kirk by a year. Michael became the family’s second monument, an actor and producer who did not need the father’s permission and still carried the father’s voltage. Colleagues — Lancaster, Kubrick, Trumbo, Bacall — learned that Douglas arrived ready and did not confuse politeness with virtue. He liked playing men the camera could not fully forgive. He said virtue does not photograph. He built a career on the proof.
The later years
After the stroke he did not retire into a clip reel. Speech therapy became the new rehearsal. Anne would not let him treat the damaged voice as a closing notice. In 1999 he made Diamonds, playing a boxer who had to learn to talk again, with Michael and grandson Cameron in the cast. He took a guest part on Touched by an Angel and earned an Emmy nomination. In March 2009, at ninety-two, he stood on the stage of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City — a house the family money had helped open in 2004 — and performed the one-man evening Before I Forget. The last screen credit is a 2008 television picture, Empire State Building Murders. The last job he treated as a job was the page.
The books kept arriving. Climbing the Mountain (1997) is the faith he took more seriously after the helicopter. My Stroke of Luck (2002) is a manual written by a man who had to relearn consonants. Let’s Face It (2007) is an old actor still arguing with the century. I Am Spartacus! (2012) is the Trumbo story as he remembered it. Other people remember pieces differently. The argument is part of the record. Children’s books sat beside the memoirs. Money went to hospitals. Harry’s Haven, an Alzheimer’s unit at the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills, is named for the ragman. He put his name on theaters and on checks. One hundred years arrived in 2016. The chin was still the chin.
Home was the Beverly Hills house with Anne, the publicist he had married in Paris in 1954 and never stopped being married to. Eric, the youngest, died in 2004. The remaining sons — Michael, Joel, Peter — kept the voltage in different rooms. He became more observant as a Jew after the crash; the boy from Amsterdam had not needed a studio to invent a faith. Friends who visited in the last decade describe a man who still wanted the next sentence finished. He appeared, carefully, when the speech would hold. He wrote when it would not. The honorary Oscar of 1996 had already taught the town what the voice cost. He spent the next twenty-four years proving the cost was not a closing credit.
He died in that house on February 5, 2020. He was one hundred and three. Anne was there. Michael was there. Hollywood, which had used the intensity and then outlived most of the men who had it, sent the usual statements. The funeral was not a premiere. A century is a long time to stay interesting. He had managed it by refusing to become merely nice.
After he was gone
Michael remains. The Trumbo credit remains, alongside Preminger’s, a pair of 1960 facts the civics class should keep together. Paths of Glory still teaches a staff college what a show trial looks like. Spartacus still plays on holiday weekends, and a certain kind of viewer still stands up with the slaves without knowing the producer’s mother was named Bryna. The honorary Oscar is in the case. The three losses are in the case beside it. He did not need the competitive statue as much as he needed the company named for the woman who had fed the ragman’s children.
He came out of Amsterdam, New York, sold junk-adjacent snacks, took a classmate’s introduction, made a boxer into a career, hired Kubrick twice, put a blacklisted name on a Roman epic, walked away from a crash, spoke through a stroke, and died at 103 as one of the last men who could remember the studio system from the inside of a fist. If you only remember the chin and the shout, you have the still. If you remember the rag cart, the title card, and the honorary night when the words came hard, you have him.
Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain (PD-US, published 1931-1963, copyright not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons