Kirk Douglas 

Despite several unrelated health problems, and recently reaching his nintieth birthday, Kirk Douglas is still enjoying an acting career. The actor best known for his most prominent feature of a cleft chin, has enjoyed a career lasting sixty years, and was named on the list of the greatest American male screen legends of all time, coming in at #17.

Born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in Amsterdam, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants of Homel, on December 9, 1916, Douglas became interested in acting while in high school. He moved on to St. Lawrence University, and while working on earning a drama scholarship, also became a star wrestler, and was president of the student body, the Mummers dramatic society, and the National Student Federation of America. Douglas continued his studies at American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship, and supported himself by waiting tables and teaching drama to children. He made friends there with Diana Dill and Betty Joan Perske, who would later become Lauren Bacall.

After choosing his stage name, Douglas began a career on Broadway, but just as it started, he then joined the U.S. Navy in order to serve in WWII. Stationed overseas, he saw Diana Dill on the cover of Life magazine and told his shipmates he would marry her one day. Medically discharged from the Navy in 1944, Douglas returned to Broadway, and also acted in radio soap operas, and in 1945 he made good on his promise to marry Dill. His career was then helped out by his other classmate, as Bacall recommended him for the lead, opposite Barbara Stanwyck, in the film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

Douglas and Dill had two sons, Michael Douglas, now an actor, and Joel Douglas, now a producer, and in 1948, he filmed I Walk Alone, his first of seven movies with Burt Lancaster, with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Devil's Disciple being two of the remaining six. It was always assumed because of the number of movies they filmed together, that they were good friends off-camera, but that wasn't the case. When he moved away from working with him, Douglas said, "I've finally gotten away from Burt Lancaster. My luck has changed for the better. I've got nice-looking girls in my films now." In 1949, Douglas filmed Champion, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, and in 1950, he made The Glass Menagerie, starring with Jane Wyman.

In 1951, Douglas and Dill divorced, and in 1954, he married Anne Buydens, who whom he had two more children, Peter Vincent Douglas and Eric Douglas. In 1954, Douglas filmed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and in 1956, he played artist Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. After filming Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, Douglas starred in another of his films, Spartacus, and thrust himself into the spotlight, speaking up against Kubrick, who was attempting to take writing credit for the film, as the true writer who had adapted it for the screen, Dalton Trumbo, was on the Hollywood blacklist.

Douglas always considered his 1962 film, Lonely Are the Brave, to be his best work, and in 1963, he became a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, then returned to the stage in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He bought the rights to it, attempting to bring it to the silver screen, yet the project sat on the shelf, and was brought back to life in 1975 by his son, Michael. The senior Douglas's career slowed down some in the 1970s as he took on acting projects a little less often, but he took on such pivotal roles such as the leads in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Fury, and Cactus Jack.

The 1980s brought Douglas a role in The Man From Snowy River, as well as Saturn 3, where he starred with Farrah Fawcett. It was also during this time that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Jefferson Award. The recognition continued for Douglas as he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, The American Cinema Award, the French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and the German Golden Kamera Award.

In 1991, Douglas was involved in a helicopter crash where two people died, and he was was left with a debilitating back injury, and in 1995, he suffered a stroke, which left him with impaired speech. He was then honored a year later with a special Academy Award for "50 years as a moral and creative force in the motion picture community." In 2003, he starred with other members of his family, Michael, his grandson Cameron, and ex-wife Diana, in the film It Runs in the Family.

One year later, his youngest son, Eric, tragically died of an apparent drug overdose.

Douglas has written many books about his life, both personal and in films, and has received much praise for them, especially The Ragman's Son. In it, he talks about his very humble beginnings, and his blessed life as a family man and one of America's screen legends.

YUDDY