Kirk Douglas, 1916-2020

Kirk Douglas, the legendary actor whose career spanned some 60 years and 90 films, has died at the age of 103. Over the dozen years I've been doing this blog, I've posted a fair number of pictures, and thankfully I had a bunch of them posted together on Douglas' 100th birthday back in 2016, so it was a bit easy to find movies to show his broad range:




The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was one of Douglas' earliest movies, with Douglas playing an ambitious district attorney married to a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) with a secret that's threatened with exposure when former friend Van Heflin returns to town after 15+ years away.



Unfortunately, the photo I had of Douglas in Out of the Past isn't as good, considering I used it to illustrate Jane Greer at some other point. But this was another auspicious movie early in Douglas' career.



Champion is, if memory serves, sometimes considered the role that really made Douglas a star, as he plays a boxer who treats people badly on the way to the top and finds life there isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's Paul Stewart in the photo, while the movie also provided Arthur Kennedy his first Oscar nomination. Kirk also got his first nomination (of three) here, never winning but getting an honorary award in 1996.



Kirk Douglas roughing up George Macready in Detective Story



Douglas as a slimy journalist in Ace in the Hole, a movie still relevant today as journalism really hasn't changed all that much.



Douglas' second Oscar nomination came for playing producer Jonathan Shields in The Bad and the Beautiful, which won Gloria Grahame her Oscar.



Poor Kirk got upstaged by Esmerelda the seal in Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which also sees Kirk doing a bit of singing. (Considering the movie, it doesn't matter whether or not he could sing, much like Jimmy Stewart in Night Passage.)



Douglas' third and final nomination came for playing Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life, a movie that won Anthony Quinn his second Oscar.



Paths of Glory is one of the movies that clearly shows Douglas' political conscience, although a lot of people are going to mention his putting noted Communist Dalton Trumbo's name back on screen in Spartacus.



There's also Seven Days in May, in which Douglas ultimately thwarts Burt Lancaster's attempted coup against president Fredric March, is another politically relevant movie, especially considering what has been going on in Washington recently.

But unlike Lancaster, Douglas had the good grace to work with John Wayne despite their political differences, making The War Wagon, a western that's fun if not so well remembered.



I was trying to remember the name of the movie I had recently blogged about in which Douglas starred with Thelma Ritter. It turns out the movie I was thinking of was For Love or Money...



but, I had forgotten that both were also in much smaller roles in



A Letter to Three Wives.

I'm sure that TCM will have a 24-hour salute to Douglas sometime after 31 Days of Oscar ends, although I haven't checked yet to see if it's already been scheduled. If you have StarzEncore Westerns, they'll be showing The Man From Snowy River on Saturday, and a movie I hadn't heard of, Posse, on Sunday. TCM will be running Martha Ivers early Tuesday morning, with The Bad and the Beautiful and Lust for Life later that day.