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
Life is like a B-picture script.
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 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.
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.
I bought the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I paid to have it made into a play and I played in it for six months. I came back and I tried to make it into a movie, without success.
Michael [Douglas] was just leaving the TV series The Streets of San Francisco and he said, 'Dad, let me try it.' I thought, 'Well, if I couldn't make it...' So, I gave it to him and he got the money, the director and the cast. The biggest disappointment for me, I always wanted to play McMurphy. They got a young actor, Jack Nicholson. I thought, 'Oh God. He will be terrible.' Then I saw the picture and, of course, he was great in it! That was my biggest disappointment that turned out to be one of the things I'm most proud of because my son Michael did it. I couldn't do it, but Michael did it.
I've played some good guys as well, in Spartacus, Paths of Glory and my favorite picture, Lonely Are the Brave, so I had a mixture of parts in my life.
Really a bad guy is more interesting, dramatically, than the good guy.