Born: December 9, 1916

Died: February 5, 2020.

KIRK Douglas, who has died aged 103, was one of the great macho stars of Hollywood. On screen, he was the gladiator, the cowboy or the soldier; off screen, he was an alpha male and womaniser whose lovers included Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich. 

But he was also an iconoclast – it was Douglas who helped bring America’s Communist witch-hunt to an end when he openly employed a blacklisted writer on his Roman epic, Spartacus.

Spartacus (1960) will always be Douglas’s most famous film, but it was not his best, or his favourite. His best was probably Paths of Glory (1957), a shattering movie set in the trenches of the First World War and directed by Stanley Kubrick; his favourite was Lonely Are The Brave (1962), a Western in which he played an old cowboy who refuses to move with the times.

However, Spartacus, in which Douglas plays a slave who rebels against his Roman masters, was the star at the peak of his powers. The film, also had considerable personal resonance for him – there was something in the story of that rebellious slave that, as a Jew and a Russian, Douglas recognised. He was Spartacus.

Douglas's stature as an actor and a father was reflected in a statement by his son, Michael, who said: “To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to”.

Douglas was born in 1916, the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants in the town of Amsterdam, New York. His father was Herschel Danielovitch, who fled Russia in 1908 to escape being drafted into the army; his mother was Bryna Sanglel, who was from a family of Ukranian farmers. He was the only boy in a family of seven and his real name was Issur Danielovitch.

The family were extremely poor and lived in a run-down house in a poor part of town. Herschel was a drinker and did not always provide for the family, but he did acquire a horse and wagon and bought and sold rags for a living. Even when Douglas was a millionaire movie star, he sought to use this poor upbringing as a self-leveller, a reminder of where he came from. “The ragman was the lowest rung of the ladder,” he once said, “and I was the ragman’s son.”

From a young age, Douglas did odd jobs to bring money into the family home, but as a Jew he was barred from many positions, and he went through a period of hating his ancestry. He realised that education was the only way out for him and he went to St Lawrence University, working in a steel mill and earning money as a wrestler to pay the school fees.

His first proper dramatic work was as a stagehand in New York. After a while, he began playing minor roles and, knowing that acting was for him, he won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where one of his contemporaries was Lauren Bacall, whom he (unsuccessfully) tried to seduce.

He also knew that Issur Danielovitch was not a good name for a would-be American star, so he chose Kirk Douglas, not recognising that it would mean he would often be mistaken for Scottish. Later, he came to love this, and he learned the words to I Belong to Glasgow, remembering them for the rest of his life.

He graduated in June 1941 and began working in theatre before serving for a time in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, a period he did not relish. It was, he said, young people trying to blow up young people, a sentiment that fed the passion of the anti-war message in Paths of Glory.

After being demobbed, he made the rounds of casting officers and started to make some money in radio shows. By this point, he had married his girlfriend, Diana, and they had a young son, Michael, who would grow up to be as big a star as his father. However, like other couples who married in a rush during the war, Douglas and his wife struggled to make their relationship work during peacetime.

He was unfaithful and became obsessed with running after women. His first sexual experience had been with his English teacher at school. Sex was important to him. Later in life, he would admit he spent too much time in sexual pursuits and was incapable of deep love as a young man. The elderly Kirk Douglas did not much like the young one.

His break into films came thanks to Lauren Bacall, who was working with the producer, Hal Wallis, and told him about Douglas. Wallis was working on a film with Barbara Stanwyck called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and got Douglas the part of her lover. He did not much care for the film, or many of those that followed in his early years. 

His first important role was in Champion, a film noir about a struggling boxer, which was a surprise hit and won him an Oscar nomination. It also led to better roles in better films, including Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, in which Douglas plays an unscrupulous reporter who prolongs a rescue effort to keep a story on the front page.

By the early 1950s, Douglas was a star, appearing in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He also set up his own production company, named Bryna after his mother, to maximise his status and take creative control of his films. The company’s most successful project was Lust for Life, a biopic of Vincent van Gogh, although Douglas found it exhausting. Probing the soul of a tormented artist was, he said, extremely painful. “I was almost gasping for it to be finished,” he said.

Lust for Life led directly to Paths of Glory, which criticised the French high command during the First World War. It was banned from the Berlin Film Festival and wasn’t shown in France until the 1970s, but Douglas was proud of it and believed it was the most important film that Kubrick ever made.

His next film was The Vikings – essentially a Western with horned hats instead of stetsons – and then, despite swearing he would never make an other epic picture, he became obsessed with turning the novel Spartacus into a film. 

Shooting began in 1959 with Anthony Mann, but Douglas was unhappy and brought Kubrick in to replace him, a gamble at the time as Kubrick was only 29 years old and inexperienced. Douglas took another gamble when he decided Dalton Trumbo, who had been secretly writing the script because he was blacklisted, should be listed on the credits. Trumbo was grateful, and it broke the blacklist for good.

The film was a big hit and has become an icon of post-war cinema, particularly for its famous line “I’m Spartacus!” but Douglas thought his finest achievement was Lonely Are the Brave, one of several Westerns he made. They included The War Wagon, with John Wayne with whom he became friends even though they had opposite views on almost everything (Wayne was a Republican, Douglas a Democrat).

When not making films, Douglas worked for both Republican and Democratic governments, however, as a goodwill ambassador for the US. He also campaigned for better conditions in care homes after making a film on the subject, Amos.

By the 1980s, he was experiencing the first of his health problems and had a pacemaker fitted. In 1996, after suffering a stroke, he considered suicide. “My depression grew until I found myself with a gun in my hand,” he once recalled. “What stopped me was the realisation that suicide is a selfish act.”

In later years, writing and charity work took up much of his time – he launched the Kirk Douglas Theatre near the MGM studio in Culver City to give young actors, playwrights and directors a chance. His marriage was strong although he always relished his own company, reflected in the role that was his favourite; the lonesome cowboy in Lonely Are the Brave. He was the character that was closest to Issur. “I’m a loner,” he said, “down deep to my very guts.”

Though he never received an Oscar, despite being nominated three times, he was presented, in 1996, with an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kirk Douglas had two children with each of his two wives. Apart from Michael (with whom he is seen here, in 2003), Peter and Joel both work as producers. The fourth son, Eric, an actor, died of a drug overdose in 2004.