• Goodbye to Spartacus: The legendary actor Kirk Douglas dies at 103
  • Reactions: Hollywood mourns the loss Kirk Douglas, the last icon of his golden age
  • Myths: Kirk Douglas leaves Olivia de Havilland alone
  • Album: The life of Kirk Douglas, in pictures

Of all the epitaphs that life has given and, above all, death, perhaps none fit better in the split jaw of Kirk Douglas like the one who got tattooed Lemmy, leader and bassist of Motörhead , first on the skin then on it tombstone: "I was born to lose, I lived to win" . Not in vain, few lovers of thunderous phrases and sound biographies (although somewhat liars) as the actor born in Amsterdam (New York) and just died at 103 years after an eternal life . "A revolutionary spirit travels the planet," he wrote about himself and about Spartacus , his most recognizable role, in his penultimate book. He did it long before a stroke limited his ability to speak and long after he knew the most severe poverty as a child. The first issue is Issur Danielovitch Demsky , that was his real name, in My Stroke of Life and the second in The Ragman's Son . Between the two books, a thousand times doomed life runs. And many others glorified.

And so, pompous quotes between desperate quotes , he was polishing a life by disproportionate force and always spurred by the obligation to get up from the bottom of the canvas. After all, boxing is all metaphor, perfect metonymy of Douglas himself. "I don't want to be a nobody's gift all my life. I want people to call me Lord ." The actor, in the skin of boxer Midge, spits the phrase in The Mud Idol (1949). It is not so much hyperbole, but also, as simple resentment. Years before Scorsese canonized the image of the boxer sunk by the weight of his own blood, Mark Robson handed Douglas a paper with the appearance of a transparent portrait and even a scar. Rarely a phrase rang on the screen more raw, more real, more sick. With the rage that only gives a biography to the height.

It is hard to know, now that he has died, which of all the possible Douglas is the one who just died. And, above all, it is hard to understand why he has died. Hadn't we stayed that was eternal? Anyway, the truth is that there are as many Kirk Douglas as spectators have dreamed about him, have fallen in love with him and, above all, have suffered with him. Because basically his filmography feeds on what hurts and what bleeds. Pure adrenaline consumed by resentment. As his own life. It is the last witness of a strange time where idols were no longer perfect beings but quite the opposite ; Stars demediated and marked by a past of anger and mud. Beside him, Montgomery Clift , Burt Lancaster , Richard Widmark , Glenn Ford and, rushing, to Marlon Brando . All, some guys as rocky outside as fragile inside. All, children of a time that woke up from World War II to a new era of uncertainty. All already dead. Not even he has resisted.

Reviewing his biography, in part, is nothing more than a scheduled exercise that is due to strange accounting . For every hit, a new mythology. For every dream, one stone. His family, well known and repeated, was poor, of the solemn poor. His first autobiography (more and more and more little cheats will come, everything is said) made it clear: they were rags. There he told how his Jewish family in an anti-Semitic neighborhood, like almost everyone, saw in the kid's awake intelligence the only chance to save himself. And to run away. Because, in effect, Douglas was born with only one idea: run away. The rabbinical school seemed its natural destiny. But ... "I wanted to be an actor," he writes, "... my mother made me a black apron and I played a shoemaker in a school play. My father, who was never interested in me, saw me from behind the scenes without I knew. After the play, he gave me my only Oscar: an ice cream. " Notice now that the Oscars arrive that Cuba Gooding Jr, for example, has Oscar. He does not.

Let's say that would be your first hit since, for rushing the simile beyond reasonable, the canvas, from an even deeper place. They would come more that will make it harder. "My engine has always been rage," he said once. And what goes for lapidary phrases, is the same for life and for the cinema. Going through the brightest part of his filmography, the one that goes from the mid-40s to the 60s, is nothing more than a walk through the destruction of fundamentally violent characters and intimately identical to Kirk himself . Always bleeding. When, after his first high school alongside Barbara Stanwyck in Martha Ivers' Strange Love , the powerful producer Hal Wallis (the man from Casablanca) proposed a contract for seven films, he rejected it. But he didn't do it with a simple "no." "He threatened to put me aside. Let them give you an ass! I pulled the spear from the side, " he recalls in Yo soy Espartaco (the other of his biographies). Let's say this one could count as his second, back to boxing, 'uppercut'.

His conviction, or simple chulería, as he wishes, made him wander the next three years as a second, not secondary, for productions, yes, as remarkable as Return to the past or Letter to three wives . " Tony [Curtis ] once told a journalist that I was like a panther with a spear stuck in his side, with tense muscles, stalking the set. In those days it was true," he writes. And so on until you get to your next one, and there are three, great blow. This is the most spectacular of them all. In 1949 came what seemed his great opportunity to establish himself as one more among the great squad of actors who swarmed through Hollywood. Together with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner , the Metro offered him, in exchange for a lot of money and peace of mind forever, to work on The Great Sinner . And, again, the gestural and rebellious Douglas was noted. He declined the offer in exchange for starring in a low-budget movie under Mark Robson . The clay idol , the one cited above, that of boxing, earned him his first of the three Oscar nominations.

The musician, in the image of Bix Beiderbecke , in love and, therefore condemned, of the woman Lauren Bacall gives life in The Trumpeter (Michael Curtiz, 1950); the sensationalist reporter of The Great Carnival (Billy Wilder, 1951) - the most brutal portrait of American journalism and society that nobody has been able to -; the corrupt police in Brigade 21 (William Wyler, 1951); the producer of unscrupulous and voracious cinema in Captives of Evil (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) --the most stark x-ray of the Hollywood lie-- or the tumultuous embodiment of suffering on the skin of Van Gogh in The Madman with Red Hair (V Minnelli, 1956) are just the most outstanding examples of a career in which each character drinks from the actor's agony. And backwards.

And so on until the year (1955, to be precise) in which Kirk Douglas definitely takes the reins of his career and his life. Undoubtedly, the technical KO (end of pugilistic references) to a destination that always looked for him. That is when he founded his own production company, Bryna Productions , which takes its mother's name. He is not the first actor he dared. Already before, his great friend Burt Lancaster did the same. It was the moment. The omnimous power of the big producers broke down thanks to the antitrus ruling against the Paramount in 1947. In addition, it was more profitable for the stars to commit to the productions and pay 52% before 75% or 92% of their income if they did not. If we add to all this the competition of television as a new gold standard of entertainment or the increasingly claudious laws of censorship or the competition of European productions, the result is that the future seemed designed for such wounded, angry, unleavened people and aware of its importance as Douglas.

Between 1955 and 1986, Bryna produced 18 films. Among them, some of the titles that would forge the legend of the man who in a few days will already be superman. Forever. Pact of honor (André de Toth, 1955) was the first film designed, produced and starred by Douglas . Then, among others, would come Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958), The Brave ones walk alone (David Miller, 1962) or, above all of them, Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) .

The film about Howard Fast's novel adapted by Dalton Trumbo meant, as he strives to prove himself in his eternal memories, the end of the Hollywood blacklists. Or maybe not as much as the author claims. But let's not take away the myth either . And less now. Be that as it may, there was, in the credit titles, the name of the forever cursed and brilliant Trumbo for posterity. Finally, the man, the most famous of the so-called 10 of Hollywood who refused to testify in 1947 in the famous trials of Maccarthysmo, regained visibility and, already put, honor. Behind was the jail, exile and the most flagrant injustice that Hollywood saw . Again, the image of the fighter Douglas had endorsed as a motive of life and work was imposed.

"A revolutionary spirit travels the planet," he writes in his memoirs as an apology and summary of what was for him the tape that, by the way, both its director and diva Kubrick came to despise. "Is it contagious? We are surprised to see crowds in American cities expressing themselves in unison and calling into question a power structure that seems impregnable. That's what Spartacus did. And tens of thousands joined their voice to theirs. Together, they were all Spartacus . " As Lemmy's skin would say: "He was born to lose, he lived to ... continue living . "

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