A Titan of the Silver Screen - Kirk Douglas

This past week, we lost one of the last great actors of the film industry's Golden Age, Kirk Douglas. I've seen several of his movies over the years, and in every one, whether a blockbuster or minor gem, Douglas shone with his special form of acting artistry. He was the recipient of the Academy Honorary Award for "50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community" in 1996.

Kirk Douglas worked hard, taking on role after role in movies since the mid-1940's. He has long been considered a major star, and ranked high on the AFI's list of "greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood". I've seen quite a few of his films, my favourites being Paths of Glory and Spartacus (both with director Stanley Kubrick), Out of the Past, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Gunfight at O.K. Corral, and Seven Days in May. As Douglas' acting output slowed down, he moved more toward TV work.

Douglas even got into the producer game as his career trajectory widened, setting up his own production company to work with Kubrick on Paths of Glory and Spartacus, then later The Brotherhood, and Posse, among others.

It is important to point out that when anti-war film Paths of Glory was released in 1957, Douglas gave full credit to its screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood Blacklist at the time, thereby putting an end to the blacklist. The blacklist was enforced by the entertainment industry during the early years of the Cold War to deny employment to anyone suspected of being Communists or sympathizers. Many careers were harmed or ended under this list, but it was Douglas who took a stand and changed the system for the better.

He was also a productive author, writing ten novels and memoirs. The guy never slowed down and had no end of creative energy.

It's especially notable that Douglas lived to the ripe old age of 103. In his illustrious lifetime, he appeared in close to one hundred films, garnering several Academy Award nominations.

For me, it was Paths of Glory and Spartacus that initially gave me an idea of Kirk Douglas's ability as an actor. In Paths of Glory, his gripping turn as the commander of a French army division who refuse to carry out a suicidal attack made an big impression on me. Then flip to his dynamic portrayal of the leader of a slave revolt in ancient Rome... stunning. The former is a smaller, more intimate (though not at all lacking in drama) story while Spartacus is a sprawling epic of great visual and narrative scope. And in both movies, Douglas gave performances that would stay with us a lifetime.

RIP, Kirk.