Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglasis 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 Iverswith Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s and 1960s, known for 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...
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth9 December 1916
CityAmsterdam, NY
When you get old the worst thing is you lose so many friends. Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne. People who I loved to work with.
I'm concerned that the world is a mess. That's why when I wrote my last book, Let's Face It, I dedicated it to the younger generation because, let's face it, the world is in a mess. Right now, the young people will inherit that mess. I think we have to do everything we can.
I think that [Barack] Obama was elected because young people are starting to get interested in their country and I think that's a very healthy thing.
I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that.
Now, why is it that most of us can talk openly about the illnesses of our bodies, but when it comes to our brain and illnesses of the mind we clam up and because we clam up, people with emotional disorders feel ashamed, stigmatized, and don't seek the help that can make the difference.
I felt [It Runs in the Family] it was a picture that, after I'm gone, my family would like to see it. It was a wonderful mixture of people in my family.
Because I love you, I will be checking up on you, ... You have honored me and I thank all of you.
I thought he was brilliant. Whenever I see that picture, I don't see my son. I see that pathetic character.
A Father. A Son. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
He was a very, very great talent and we have lost someone important.
I have a great respect for actors like Clint Eastwood, who's a wonderful director. I think two pictures that I directed were not successful, so I decided not to make any more.
I was going to play in First Blood, but I suggested to changing it and I dropped out. I said to [Silvester] Stallone, 'You know, I almost stopped you from making millions of dollars,' because in my suggestion, I killed his character at the end of the picture .
I directed two films, not very successfully, and after that, I went back to being an actor and a producer.
When I made Spartacus during the McCarthy Era, we were losing our freedom. It was an awful, awful way. McCarthy saw Communists everywhere, in every level of government and they concentrated on Hollywood and especially on Hollywood writers.