We all grew up with Kirk Douglas, the ultimate legend to have married the golden age of Hollywood from black and white to Cinemascope, but none of us knew who Issur Danielovitch Demsky, his birth name, was, died Wednesday at the age of 103. A very long name and at the same time "nothing", zero, as he notes in his autobiography "The son of the ragpicker": " Nothing , that meant being the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, illiterate ...", writes it in this magnificent text which helps to understand why "Spartacus" (1960) by Stanley Kubrick, this peplum on a slave revolt in Antiquity, was more than a film for this son of the persecuted. His father had fled anti-Semitic Russia from pogroms and "Cossacks excited by vodka, who amused themselves by splitting the skulls of Jews in the streets of ghettos, at the galloping of their horses," he said. One of my mother's brothers was killed in the street before his eyes. ”
He fought all his life against infamy. Against the America of McCarthyism and the witch hunt, he who imposes in the middle of the Cold War the scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, proscribed in the "black list" - these supposed communists who did not have the right to work - in the credits of " Spartacus ”. Against the military butchery of 1914-1918 in "The paths of glory" by the same Kubrick, a film long banned which reduces the current "1917" to a simple technical performance. It's not cinema: Kirk Douglas went to war, the real one, in 1942, aboard a submarine.
Glory and rebellion
He seeks the inconvenient truth behind the beauty that suits. Review “the Arrangement” (1969), by Elia Kazan, Titanic of conjugal life, where the actor settles his account with success erected as a single value, as a publicity income from everything.
Kirk Douglas, this paradox, glory and rebellion, a beautiful mouth a little broken, lagoon blue eyes and dimple with split chin. The wrestler - he fought at fairs to pay for acting classes - chooses films that resemble him. In Howard Hawks's "Captive with Clear Eyes" (1952), in the pantheon of the most beautiful westerns, her character falls in love with an Indian woman. The opposite of a John Wayne, and several decades before "Dance with the wolves", Kirk Douglas places himself on the side of the minorities, of the oppressed.
DEATH OF A LEGEND - Kirk Douglas, the last giant of Hollywood, died during the night. Unforgettable Spartacus, the actor has also toured with the greatest American directors. In 1967, he expressed his love for westerns. And in perfect French! #KirkDouglasRIP pic.twitter.com/NTQHR3N5un
- Ina.fr (@Inafr_officiel) February 6, 2020Son Van Gogh, in the film by Vincente Minnelli, is inhabited and hallucinated. And for good reason: the young painter wanted to be a pastor. The actor, according to the family wish, should have become a rabbi. After surviving a helicopter accident in 1991, he returned to the Jewish faith. He was, in every sense of the word, a spiritual, as funny on television sets - a memorable sequence of Apostrophes testifies - as a prophet.
"Deeply proud to be an American"
In 2016, the fervent Democrat scrap with Donald Trump: "I have always been deeply proud to be an American. For the days that remain to me, I pray that this will never change. ”
This tough guy had perhaps learned gentleness among his six sisters. At the New York Academy of Drama, he made advances to Lauren Bacall. She pushes him away. She does better: the young actress launches her career by recommending it. Many others fall into his arms, from Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth to Marlene Dietrich.
Those he marries remain in the shadows, of Diana Dill, actress who appeared in numerous series and mother of her son Michael - who, unlike his father several times named, won the Oscar for "Wall Street" - and Anne Buydens, Belgian producer, who celebrated her 100th birthday herself last year. The couple had lost a son, victim of an overdose in 2004. The tragedy, the son of the ragpicker never erased it on the screen. Last of the giants, first of the moderns in its painful confrontation with the American dream.
