The Not-So-Rough Cut - Kirk Douglas - Brief Article

Interview, Jan, 2000

Kirk Douglas made a career out of playing tough guys with human frailties. This month he returns to the screen in Diamonds, the 83-year-old actor's 83rd movie

Eighty-three years after issur Danielovitch, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born in Amsterdam, New York, the driven actor he became is still plying his trade in the movies. Screen acting is a vain occupation and most stars would be expected to retire after suffering a stroke, but "retirement" is not a word in Kirk Douglas's lexicon. As for vanity, Douglas's portrayal of a former boxing champion recovering from a stroke in this month's Diamonds required him to reveal much of the physical humiliation that this once-imposing specimen of manhood went through himself. Not that Douglas is hard to watch as a cantankerous geezer; we would all do well to be so old, so playful, and so ornery.

The following interview is a composite of two conversations I had with the redoubtable star. The first was conducted at his Hollywood home in 1997. The second took place recently on the telephone, and his wit and vigor fairly crackled down the line.

GRAHAM FULLER Was it exciting for you to get back in front of the camera?

KIRK DOUGLAS: Well, when I first had my stroke [in 1995], I assumed that would be the end of my career as an actor unless I wanted to wait for silent pictures to come back. I turned Diamonds down at first but then I thought, Hey, this could be a perfect part for me. It was fun to work again, especially with [Lauren] Bacall. I said, "You'd make a perfect madam." She said, "What?!" We've been friends for over fifty years. I knew her when she was a fifteen-year-old girl at drama school, and we did a picture [Young Man With a Horn, 1950] when she was married to Bogart.

GF: It's moving to see you together again.

KD: I'm glad of that. I wanted to make a movie to entertain, to take people out of their lives. But if people ask me if it has a message, I think of what my character says to his son [Dan Aykroyd] in the picture: "No matter what happens to you--you can't talk, you can't walk--don't give up."

GF: There's a scene in a hotel room where you break down. Were you drawing directly on the frustrations you'd experienced yourself?

KD: Yes. I threw in many things that have happened to me. I was filled with such melancholia after my stroke that I had to get through a period when I just wanted to lie in bed and do nothing. But then I thought, Maybe God is testing me and I must past the test. I must make my handicap work for me.

GF: So was making the film therapeutic?

KD: It was, because suddenly I was functioning, being an actor, as I have been all my life. It was the same when I got my golf game back up to eighteen holes--you no longer feel like a cripple. And it has encouraged me to keep up with my writing. I wrote a children's book called The Broken Mirror and I've recently written another one called Young Heroes of the Bible. I'm proud of this book because it came out of my own reading of the Bible that followed everything that had happened to me.

GF: You mean the stroke and the helicopter crash you were in in 1991?

KD: Yes. Why did I survive that accident when two young people died in it? That filled me with so much guilt. I also think my generation messed up. What did we do to the world? With all the strange things that are happening with young kids today, how can you talk about morality to them? The word frightens them. In my Young Heroes of the Bible, I wanted to show that the Bible is an adventure story involving the young, hoping it will incite young people to have more interest in reading it in a different way.

GF: Do you think you would have re-embraced Judaism If you hadn't had the accident?

KD: I don't think my interest in it would have come about if I hadn't been heavily reminded of mortality. When my stroke came I thought, What is God doing to me? What good is an actor who can't walk and who can't talk? Will he become a public speaker? [laughs] But I think everybody has to come to terms with some spiritual growth. In my case, I was born a Jew, but I neglected it for Sixty years, and then it was suddenly reawakened and I became a strong Jew, yet in a secular way. I didn't embrace all the tenets of orthodoxy. One rabbi said to me, "Kirk, I think you are a Jew because you think it is dramatic." That wasn't far from the truth because it is dramatic being part of a race that's been dispersed all over the world.

GF: Do you regret not embracing your faith earlier?

KD: I think I would have been a much happier person and might have had more of an impact on my kids. You see, we are supposed to teach it to our children and I never taught it to mine. I think, in one way or the other, the world is searching for something to believe and is tired of all the technological advances. It's more important that you seek something within yourself that says, "I'm living."

GF: You wrote in Climbing the Mountain [1997] that the accident released deep feelings in you that were caused by a lack of confidence. This doesn't gel with your on-screen persona or the way you applied yourself in Hollywood.