Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,862
By This is the grave of Kirk Douglas.
Born in 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, Issur Danielovitch grew up very poor in the Jewish immigrant community of that upstate Erie Canal-based town. His father was a hopeless alcoholic, a ragman, the only immigrant who was seemingly downwardly mobile leaving Belarus and coming to New York. Kirk would later blame his father for some of the problems he himself would have as a person.
Douglas had to work from the time he was a child, selling snacks to mill workers and then delivering newspapers. He stared appearing in plays in high school and desperately wanted to be an actor to escape his awful life. He was accepted into St. Lawrence University, but didn’t have the money to go, so he went to the administration and talked his way into a scholarship. He graduated in 1939 and then was off to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. There, he was classmates with Lauren Bacall, who became his friend and later his mentor when she was a big star and he was trying to break into Hollywood. He joined the Navy when World War II broke out and was on a submarine chaser. But a depth charge exploded and he got hurt. So he was discharged for medical reasons in 1944.
Douglas returned to New York to do theater and voice work on commercials and radio. He got a big part in F. Hugh Herbert’s Kiss and Tell, which Richard Widmark had premiered. Douglas took over when Widmark stepped away and was great at the part, leading to much more attention. That led Bacall to give a call to Hal Wallis, the producer, and she told him he had to do something for Douglas.
It did not take Douglas long after he hit Hollywood to make it big. He was hardly a child star of course; he was 30 when he debuted in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, working with Barbara Stanwyck. But even here, he had fourth billing, so the studio found promise. And of course that paid off. Douglas almost immediately became a major bankable star. Champion, a boxing film from 1949, is a pretty good early Douglas performance. That became his first Oscar nomination. He never did win an Oscar though. He had a Golden Globe nomination for 1951’s Detective Story. He was also great in 1947’s Out of the Past, 1950’s Young Man with a Horn, and 1951’s Ace in the Hole. He then received a second Oscar nomination for 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful, working with Lana Turner. He received his third for the Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life, in 1956. He won the Golden Globe for that one.
Douglas was pretty ambitious too and chafed against the studio system. He also was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, disgusted by how the McCarthy era blacklist had hurt so many people in Hollywood. So he decided to do something about both of these things. In 1949, he started his own production company and by the late 50s, he began to hire blacklisted people to work on his films. He also got to know Stanley Kubrick, a then young director somewhat on the margins of Hollywood. Douglas produced and starred in two of the most iconic films either he or Douglas would ever make–1957’s Paths of Glory and 1960’s Spartacus. The former is the greater movie, but it was the latter where he really took on the blacklist, through ensuring that Dalton Trumbo would receive writing credits under his own name. Both films were also strongly anti-authoritarian, which was easier to do when critiquing the Romans, and part of what makes Paths of Glory so brilliant is taking on the World War I military, French as it may have been. Having the right-wing asshole Adolphe Menjou, who loved him the blacklist, in that film did not hurt it.
By the early 60s, Douglas was making the finest art of his career. I just think 1962’s Lonely Are the Brave is a brilliant film. Adapted from an Edward Abbey book, it follows the travails of a modern day cowboy who just absolutely does not fit into postwar America. This man who was really a late 19th century figure liked to drink and fight and was a good ol’boy who hated authority. But who can really take on authority in the early 1960s? In the end, he gets run over by a toilet truck driven by Carroll O’Connor. Then there was 1964’s Seven Days in May, another classic, or near so. At the same time, in 1963, he starred in the original Broadway adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He thought about making that movie and bought the rights, but gave it to his son Michael, of course rising quickly in the Hollywood world on his own, who did a great job with that adaptation.
With the transition of Hollywood in 1967 to the new generation, a lot of the older studio system actors either retired or took a big step back. Douglas was more the latter. He still worked, pretty frequently through the 80s, but in mostly pretty minor films. He did Tough Guys with Burt Lancaster and other old guys, that kind of reunion nostalgia kind of thing. Then he was in a helicopter crash in 1991 that deeply shook him. He should have died there. That got him exploring his Judaism much more deeply as he thought about what death would have meant. In 1996, he had a major stroke and that impacted his ability to speak, though as is well known, he bravely fought on and recovered much of his speaking skills, even if he never would be the man he was before then.
Later in life, Douglas became the Grand Old Man of Hollywood. Not only did he become the last living major star of the 1950s, but his recovery from his stroke and his bravery in this really won the hearts of millions. He could appear anywhere and get a standing ovation. That he was almost totally functional until the end of his life certainly didn’t hurt. Who wouldn’t want to live to be over 100 while overcoming a massive health issue and becoming beloved?
However, I will never be able to see Douglas in a completely positive life because he was also a sexual predator and any discussion of him has to include this point. Most famously, he raped Natalie Wood in 1955. She was 16 years old and just starting in Hollywood. There are those who defend him, including in Hollywood today, and I don’t know of any other rumored examples of him committed sexual assault, but there seems little real question that this happened. In fact, he was pretty much a terrible person for much of his life. Douglas himself said he was a “son of a bitch” and the “I’m probably the most disliked actor in Hollywood. And I feel pretty good about it. Because that’s me… . I was born aggressive, and I guess I’ll die aggressive.”
Douglas died in 2020. He was 103 years old.
Kirk Douglas is buried in Westwood Memorial Cemetery, Los Angeles, California. Of course his troubled son Eric is here too, a sad story. Anne Buydens (born Hannelore Marx) was his second wife. She had done some producing, but left the industry by and large when she married Kirk, the fate of so many women of that era. She lived to be 102.
If you would like this series to visit other actors nominated for the Academy Awards in 1949, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Broderick Crawford, who won Best Actor for All the King’s Men, is in Johnstown, New York. Gregory Peck, nominated for Twelve O’Clock High, is in Los Angeles, but a different cemetery than Douglas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.