It was one of the last Hollywood legends. Kirk Douglas died Wednesday at the age of 103. With a hundred films to his credit, including the famous Spartacus , he was an icon of American cinema, and his death sparked a wave of global emotion. Among those who had the chance to rub shoulders with this monster of the big screen, there is Gilles Jacob, the patron of the Cannes festival when Kirk Douglas was its president in 1980. For Europe 1, he remembers.
The man who resisted everything, "even Hollywood"
"He was a man who could not bear to be resisted, he had a fierce will," he said at the microphone of Europe 1. The actor who had "made himself" represented " the American dream, the Hollywood of the great era ". Kirk Douglas "was one of the people who played impactful roles and very different from each other," recalls the specialist.
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"He was cynical, but also vulnerable. He survived everything, a helicopter accident at the age of 90, a stroke, a heart attack ..." he says. Before making a little humor: "He even resisted Hollywood, since he never had an Oscar except that of consolation [the Oscar of honor, in 1996, editor's note] for his career, but it's not the same thing. "