The ragman's son who helped crack Hollywood's blacklist
Issur Danielovitch grew up on the poorest street in Amsterdam, New York, the son of a junk collector. As Kirk Douglas he became a 1950s box-office giant, gave a blacklisted writer his name back on screen with Spartacus, and lived to 103 as one of Hollywood's last Golden Age stars.
He was born on December 9, 1916, the fourth of seven children and the only boy in a Yiddish-speaking household. His parents, Bryna and Herschel Danielovitch, had come from Chavusy in what is now Belarus. His father, once a horse trader, bought rags and scrap metal from a small wagon; in his 1988 memoir The Ragman's Son, Douglas described that trade as the bottom rung even on impoverished Eagle Street. The family took the surname Demsky from an uncle, and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas before joining the US Navy in the Second World War.
His first film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), paired him with Barbara Stanwyck. Playing a ruthless boxer in Champion (1949) earned his first Best Actor nomination, and two more followed, for The Bad and the Beautiful and for his Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, which won him a Golden Globe. Across more than 90 films he was known for an explosive, intense style.
At 32, in 1949, he founded Bryna Productions, named after his mother. It produced Paths of Glory and Spartacus, both directed by a then little-known Stanley Kubrick. On Spartacus Douglas insisted that Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, receive an official credit, a move widely seen as helping to end the blacklist. He also bought the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, starred in it on Broadway in 1963, and handed the property to his son Michael, whose film version won the Oscar. He made seven films with Burt Lancaster.
Later honours included an honorary Academy Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he wrote ten novels and memoirs. A helicopter crash in 1991 that he barely survived, then a stroke in 1996, turned him back toward his Jewish faith. He died in 2020, still married to the producer Anne Buydens.
Source: Kirk Douglas
