Kirk Douglas died on the night of Wednesday to Thursday. He was 103 years old. It was her son, Michael Douglas, who announced the sad news on his Facebook page.
“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 cinema (…) but for me and my brothers, Joel and Peter, he was just a dad “.
“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.”
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Kirk Douglas was born on December 9, 1916 in Amsterdam, a small town in the state of New York. His real name was Issur Danielovitch Demsky. Despite his miserable childhood, or perhaps because of it, this son of a Jewish ragpicker who fled Russia had only eyes for the movies.
After enlisting in the Navy during the Second World War, he landed small roles before finally meeting success with a role of hard boxer in “The Champion”.
“Spartacus”, the peplum that made him a world star
Hollywood opens its doors to him and he goes on to film, a hundred in total, the best of which have become classics: “20,000 leagues under the sea” (1954), “Paths of glory” (1957) by Stanley Kubrick, who ‘he finds for “Spartacus” (1960), a peplum which makes him a world star.
A committed actor who has always been close to the Democrats, Kirk Douglas had the audacity, in the midst of a McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s, to hire a screenwriter on the black list of those accused of Communist sympathies.
No Oscar
Despite the glory, successes and three nominations in the 1950s, he never won an Oscar in his career, much to his regret. He had had it handy with “Flight over a cuckoo’s nest” directed by Milos Forman in 1975, but the lead role had spun under his nose. “It’s a tragedy for me. It’s Nicholson who got the part and he got an Oscar. I don’t have one,” said Kirk Douglas.
The Hollywood legend had to wait until 1996 to win an honorary Oscar for his entire career. He had just had a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side of his face, which did not stop him from going on stage to receive his award and deliver a speech.
Determined not to hang up the gloves despite this handicap, the stubborn Douglas had undergone a long and painful rehabilitation to relearn how to express himself.
He had thus lent his voice to a character from the Simpsons before making appearances in some films, like “Diamonds” in 1999, where he played a boxer victim of a stroke … Kirk Douglas had found his friend for the occasion forever, Lauren Bacall.
Heart attack in 2001
After a heart attack in 2001, he found his way back to the set for “Une si belle famille”, where he appeared in 2003 alongside his son Michael, his grandson Cameron and his ex-wife Diana Dill.
Again in 2009, Kirk Douglas had climbed the stage of a theater bearing his name near Los Angeles for four performances of an autobiographical one-man show.
A seducer
Great seducer, he had multiplied the conquests but lived since 1954 with the same woman, Anne Buydens, met in France and became his second wife.
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