To help support himself, he worked as a janitor during the school year. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., where he earned a varsity letter for wrestling and was elected president of the student body. Thanks to a college loan, he was accepted at St. Unable to afford college after graduating from high school in 1934, he worked in a department store for a year and played John Barrymore in a little theater production of “The Royal Family.” I still do,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I have always wanted to be an actor, I believe from the first time I recited a poem in kindergarten about the Red Robin of Spring. (The family later changed its name to Demsky, and young Issur was renamed Isadore - a name he said he always hated and which prompted a nickname that he hated even more, Izzy.)Īs a child, Douglas developed an early sense of the direction his life might take. The only son of seven children of illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on Dec. Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote in 2016 that on camera, Douglas had the remarkable gift for “for being at the same time defiantly himself and convincingly other people.”
“He was a very modern American anti-hero type, but he could also play anything, really,” said Basinger.
So you knew he was going to be a star.”ĭouglas, she said, “embodied the anti-hero in movies” in films such as “Champion” and “Ace in the Hole,” in which he played an unscrupulous newspaper reporter who cynically exploits a tragedy to boost his career.
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“He wasn’t a traditional leading man, really, in looks, and yet he had an unmistakable charisma and power on screen - not just the glamour of the movie star, though he did have that, but real acting chops. “I immediately focused on him because he was different,” Basinger told The Times. “He’s one of the legendary figures of his era,” said film historian Jeanine Basinger, chair of the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University, who first saw Douglas on screen as a young movie-goer in the late 1940s. In acknowledgment of a career that spanned more than 60 years and more than 80 films, Douglas was honored late in life with numerous major awards: The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and an honorary Oscar for his “50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.” produced a number of films in which Douglas starred, including director Stanley Kubrick’s landmark anti-war film, “Paths of Glory,” “The Vikings” and “Spartacus.” Douglas’ Joel Productions, named after one of his sons, also produced “Seven Days in May” and “Lonely Are the Brave.”Īs executive producer of “Spartacus,” Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name for his work on the 1960 Roman-Empire epic that starred Douglas as the gladiator-trained slave-revolt leader. Named after Douglas’ immigrant mother, the Bryna Co. Never a fan of the Hollywood studio system - he likened the standard seven-year studio contract to slavery - Douglas launched his own independent production company in 1955. That’s why I’m often attracted to characters that aren’t likable.” “I like a role that is stimulating, challenging, interesting to play. “I have never felt any need to project a certain image as an actor,” Douglas wrote in “The Ragman’s Son,” his bestselling 1988 autobiography.
The stage-trained Douglas earned the first Oscar nomination of his long acting career playing one of the post-World War II era’s anti-heroes: the ruthlessly ambitious boxer in the 1949 drama “Champion.”ĭouglas later received Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as tormented artist Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 biographical drama “Lust for Life.”