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It seemed like he was just not the sort of star who would succumb to anything as mundane as dying, but the death of actor Kirk Douglas has been announced, and another of the last links to Hollywood's Golden Age has gone.
Born into poverty in New York, he was determined to succeed, and once he caught the acting bug at college there was no stopping him. His debut was in 1946's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a film noir, and he was soon a star on the rise, moving from the likes of Out of the Past to star status in boxing drama Champion, savage drama Ace in the Hole, Detective Story, movie about movies The Bad and the Beautiful, Ulysses, Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lust for Life (as Van Gogh), Gunfight at the OK Corral, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and The Vikings.
That was the 1950s, and he remained a star into the 1960s and beyond thanks to his superhuman tenacity in such films as Spartacus, Lonely are the Brave, Two Weeks in Another Town, Seven Days in May, The Way West, The Light at the Edge of the World, A Gunfight (with Johnny Cash), Posse, and then onto trashier fare with Once is Not Enough, Holocaust 2000, The Fury, The Villain, Saturn 3 and The Final Countdown. Come the 1980s, he had nothing left to prove, but did so anyway in The Man from Snowy River, Tough Guys, Oscar, Greedy and Diamonds. The father of Michael Douglas, frequent co-star of fellow legend Burt Lancaster, and one of the most vivid egos Hollywood has ever witnessed, we will not see his like again. |
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