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Kirk Douglas is a Actor, Director, Scriptwriter and Producer American born on 9 december 1916 at New York City (USA)

Kirk Douglas

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Birth name Issur Danielovitch Demsky
Nationality USA
Birth 9 december 1916 at New York City (USA)
Death 5 february 2020 (at 103 years)
Awards Legion of Honour, Presidential Medal of Freedom, National Medal of Arts

Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch; December 9, 1916) is an American actor, producer, director, and author. After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he had his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s and 1960s, known for doing serious dramas, including westerns and war movies. During a sixty-year acting career, he has appeared in over 90 movies, and in 1960 was responsible for helping to end the Hollywood blacklist.

In 1949, after a lead role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion, for which he was nominated as Best Actor, Douglas became a star. His style of acting relied on expressing great concentration, realism, and powerful emotions, and he subsequently gravitated toward roles requiring strong characters. Among his early films were Young Man with a Horn, playing opposite Lauren Bacall (1950), Billy Wilder's controversial Ace in the Hole (1951), and Detective Story (1951). He received a second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), where he played opposite Lana Turner. And his powerful acting as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956) is considered one of his finest roles. He is one of the last living actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In 1955, he established Bryna Productions, which began producing films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In those two films, he starred and collaborated with then relatively unknown director, Stanley Kubrick. He produced and starred in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), considered a cult classic, and Seven Days in May (1964), opposite Burt Lancaster, with whom he made seven films. In 1963, he starred in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a story he purchased, which he later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.

As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas has received three Academy Award nominations, an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and the Medal of Freedom. As an author, he has written 10 novels and memoirs. Currently, he is No. 17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema, and the highest-ranked living person on the list. After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he has focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life. He lives with producer Anne Buydens, his wife of over 60 years.

Biography

Marriages and children
Douglas married twice, first to Diana Dill, on November 2, 1943. They divorced in 1951.
The couple had two sons, actor Michael Douglas and producer Joel Douglas.
Afterwards, he met German American producer Anne Buydens in Paris while acting on location in Lust for Life. She originally fled from Germany to escape Nazism and survived by putting her multilingual skills to work at a film studio, doing translations for subtitles. They married on May 29, 1954, and in 2014 they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. They had two sons, producer Peter Douglas and actor Eric Douglas. Eric Douglas died on July 6, 2004, of a drug overdose.

Religion and renewed spirituality
In February 1991, Douglas survived a collision between a helicopter he was on, and a small plane above Santa Paula Airport. Two others were also injured, and two people on the plane died. This near-death experience sparked a search for meaning by Douglas, which led him, after much study, to embrace the Judaism in which he was raised. He documented this spiritual journey in his book Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (2001). In his earlier autobiography, The Ragman's Son (1988), he recalled, "years back, I tried to forget that I was a Jew," but later in his career he began "coming to grips with what it means to be a Jew," which became a theme in his life. In an interview in 2000, he explained this transition:

Judaism and I parted ways a long time ago, when I was a poor kid growing up in Amsterdam, N.Y. Back then, I was pretty good in cheder, so the Jews of our community thought they would do a wonderful thing and collect enough money to send me to a yeshiva to become a rabbi. Holy Moses! That scared the hell out of me. I didn't want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be an actor. Believe me, the members of the Sons of Israel were persistent. I had nightmares – wearing long payos and a black hat. I had to work very hard to get out of it. But it took me a long time to learn that you don't have to be a rabbi to be a Jew.

Douglas notes that the underlying theme of some of his films, including The Juggler (1953), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), and Remembrance of Love (1982), was about "a Jew who doesn't think of himself as one, and eventually finds his Jewishness." The Juggler was the first Hollywood feature to be filmed in the newly established state of Israel. Douglas recalls that while there, he saw "extreme poverty and food being rationed." But he found it "wonderful, finally, to be in the majority." Its producer, Stanley Kramer, tried to portray "Israel as the Jews' heroic response to Hitler's destruction."

Although his children had a non-Jewish mother, Douglas states that they were "aware culturally" of his "deep convictions," and he never tried to influence their own religious decisions. Douglas' wife, Anne, converted to Judaism before they renewed their wedding vows in 2004. Douglas celebrated a second Bar-Mitzvah ceremony in 1999 at the age of eighty-three.

Philanthropy
Douglas and his wife have donated to various non-profit causes during his career, and were planning on donating most of their $80 million net worth.

Among the donations have been those to his former high school and college. In September 2001, he helped fund his high school's musical, "Amsterdam Oratorio," composed by Maria Riccio Bryce, who won the school Thespian Society's Kirk Douglas Award in 1968. In 2012 he donated $5 million to St. Lawrence University, his alma mater. The college used the donation for the scholarship fund he began in 1999.

He has also donated to various schools, medical facilities and other non-profit organizations in southern California. These have included the rebuilding of over 400 Los Angeles Unified School District playgrounds that were aged and in need of restoration. They established the Anne Douglas Center for Homeless Women at the Los Angeles Mission, which has helped hundreds of women turn their lives around. In Woodland Hills, they enlarged Harry's Haven Alzheimer's unit to care for patients at the Motion Picture Home. And in Culver City, they opened the Kirk Douglas Theater in 2004. They have also supported the Anne Douglas Childhood Center at the Sinai Temple of Westwood. In March 2015, Kirk and his wife donated $2.3 million to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Politics
Douglas and his wife, Anne, have been involved in numerous volunteer and philanthropic activities. They traveled to more than 40 countries, at their own expense, to act as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. Information Agency, speaking to audiences about why democracy works and what freedom means. In 1980, he flew to Cairo to talk with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. For all his goodwill efforts, Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Upon giving the award, Carter said that Douglas has "done this in a sacrificial way, almost invariably without fanfare and without claiming any personal credit or acclaim for himself." In subsequent years, he has testified before Congress about abuse of the elderly.

Douglas has been a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party. He has on occasion written letters to politicians who were friends. He notes in his memoir, Let's Face It (2007), that he felt compelled to write to former president Jimmy Carter in 2006 in order to stress that "Israel is the only successful democracy in the Middle East... [and] has had to endure many wars against overwhelming odds. If Israel loses one war, they lose Israel."

Health
On January 28, 1996, he suffered a severe stroke, impairing his ability to speak. Doctors told his wife that unless there was rapid improvement, it was likely he would permanently lose his voice. After a long, daily, regime of voice therapy over the following months, his capacity to speak came back, but still limited. He was able to accept an honorary Academy Award two months later in March and thank the audience.

Douglas wrote about this experience in a book, My Stroke of Luck, which he hoped would be an "operating manual" for others on how to handle a stroke victim in their own family.

Hobbies
Douglas blogs semi-regularly; originally hosted on Myspace, his posts have been hosted by the Huffington Post since 2012. He is believed to be the oldest celebrity blogger in the world.