page_title: Kirk Douglas
section_title: 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Kirk Douglas / Career / 1960s
caption_attribution_description: English: Poster for the film Spartacus (1960)
context_page_description: Kirk Douglas was an American actor, producer, director, philanthropist, and writer. After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he made his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war films. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 films. Douglas was known for his explosive acting style, which he displayed as a criminal defense attorney in Town Without Pity.
  Douglas became an international star through positive reception for his leading role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion, which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other early films include Young Man with a Horn, playing opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day, Ace in the Hole opposite Jan Sterling, and Detective Story, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Drama.
context_section_description: In 1960, Douglas played the title role in what many consider his career defining appearance as the Thracian gladiator slave rebel Spartacus with an all-star cast in Spartacus (1960). He was the executive producer as well, which raised the $12 million production cost and made it one of the most expensive films up to that time. Douglas initially selected Anthony Mann to direct, but replaced him early on with Stanley Kubrick, with whom he had previously collaborated in Paths of Glory.
  When the film was released, Douglas gave full credit to its screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood blacklist, and thereby effectively ended it. About that event, Douglas said, "I've made over 85 pictures, but the thing I'm most proud of is breaking the blacklist." However the film's producer Edward Lewis and the family of Dalton Trumbo publicly disputed Douglas's claim.  In the film Trumbo (2015), Douglas is portrayed by Dean O'Gorman.
  Douglas bought the rights to stage a play of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from its author, Ken Kesey. He mounted a play from the material in 1963 in which he starred and that ran on Broadway for five months. Reviews were mixed. Douglas retained the movie rights due to an innovative loophole of basing the rights on the play rather than the novel, despite Kesey's objections, but after a decade of being unable to find a producer he gave the rights to his son, Michael. In 1975, the film version was produced by Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, and starred Jack Nicholson, as Douglas was then considered too old to play the character as written. The picture won all five major Academy Awards, only the second film to achieve that feat, including best actor statuette for Nicholson.
  Douglas made seven films over the decades with Burt Lancaster: I Walk Alone (1948), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Devil's Disciple (1959), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), Victory at Entebbe (1976) and Tough Guys (1986), which fixed the notion of the pair as something of a team in the public imagination. Douglas was always billed under Lancaster in these movies but, with the exception of I Walk Alone, in which Douglas played a villain, their roles were usually more or less the same size. Both actors arrived in Hollywood at about the same time, and first appeared together in the fourth film for each, albeit with Douglas in a supporting role. They both became actor-producers who sought out independent Hollywood careers.
  John Frankenheimer, who directed the political thriller Seven Days in May in 1964, had not worked well with Lancaster in the past, and originally did not want him in this film. However Douglas thought Lancaster would fit the part and "begged me to reconsider," said Frankenheimer, and he then gave Lancaster the most colorful role. "It turns out that Burt Lancaster and I got along magnificently well on the picture," he later said.
  In 1967 Douglas starred with John Wayne in the western film directed by Burt Kennedy titled The War Wagon.
  In The Arrangement (1969), a drama directed by Elia Kazan, based upon his novel of the same title, Douglas starred as a tormented advertising executive, with Faye Dunaway as costar. The film did poorly at the box office, receiving mostly negative reviews, while Dunaway felt many of the reviews were unfair, writing in her biography, "I can't understand it when people knock Kirk's performance, because I think he's terrific in the picture," adding that "he's as bright a person as I've met in the acting profession." She says that his "pragmatic approach to acting" would later be a "philosophy that ended up rubbing off on me."
caption: Spartacus (1960)
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