In 1941 she debuted on Broadway with the work Spring Again. Among his first works in the theater highlights entitled The Three Sisters, Which appears under the pseudonym George Spelvin Jr. During World War II he enlisted in the Navy and had reached the rank of lieutenant, and was to end the conflict when it debuted in the film giving life to the bitter husband of Barbara Stanwyck in the melodrama directed by Lewis Milestone The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). His second big screen role came in Back to the past (1947), by Jacques Tourneur. In that same year signed a five-year contract with independent producer Hal B. Wallis, but broke only a year later.

The clay idol (1949), Mark Robson, was his first starring role, in which released its strong physical and the characteristic dimple in her chin. He portrayed a boxer whose character was perfectly suited to the characteristics of film personality: ambitious fighter and without too many scruples. This film got his first Oscar nomination for the Academy.

After signing an exclusive contract to Warner Brothers, starred in a series of films that consolidated their position in the spotlight, as Young man with a horn (1950), film biography of jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke directed by Michael Curtiz and Douglas shared the stage with Lauren Bacall and Doris Day. One of his first major characters was that of journalist Chuck Tatum The Big Carnival (1951), Billy Wilder, which delayed the rescue of a man buried in a cave to get his big story and recover the prestige lost.

In The Bad (1952), Vincente Minnelli, added a touch of sophistication to another role in the line hard and unyielding characters, for which he won his second Oscar nomination, playing the movie producer Jonathan Shields, that manipulates and destroys almost lives of his closest collaborators, the director, the writer and star, played by Lana Turner, for the best artistic results.

Minnelli became one of the key principals in his career, both returned to work in The Lust (1956), biography of painter Vincent Van Gogh by Douglas, in one of his great performances, earned his third Oscar nomination and the Critics Award in New York. Anthony Quinn playing with him his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) was the third and last of the collaborations of director and star. Set in the world of film, Douglas gives it life dramatically declining a struggling actor desperate for one last chance.

In 1954 he married Anne Badyens, who bore him two sons, Peter and Eric. During the fifties played on the orders of some of the best directors of the moment, a series of papers that forged his legend as an actor and made him a favorite of audiences and critics during this period. Brigade 21 (1951), William Wyler film directed police or Big Sky (1952), where he worked under the orders of Howard Hawks, are two of the titles that earned him more fame.

His strength and character made him stand out in action genres such as western, in the context of which deserve special mention his collaborations with director John Sturges. The first was Duel (1957), in which he played Doc Holliday in a review of the legendary fight at the OK Corral, in the second, Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), gave birth to a sheriff pursuing the murderers of his Indian wife. Also within the genre of western starred The lawless prairie (1955), King Vidor, in which he played a cowboy fighting the harassment of civilization and wire fencing of the fields.

If the paper gave Vincente Minnelli was instrumental in his career, no less important was his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. Paths of Glory (1957) was his first job in common. Written by Kubrick himself in collaboration with the great writer Jim Thompson novels, his virulent anti-militar prevented its production until Kirk Douglas took a personal interest in the project and decided to produce it through his company, Bryna Productions, reducing his salary to hundred thousand dollars, nearly a third of normal.

Paths of Glory tells the story of Colonel Dax, sent during the First World War on a suicide mission and bombed during the withdrawal by their own artillery. Three years later he returned to work with Kubrick on Spartacus (1960). Douglas In that film he played the slave who rebelled against the power of their masters in imperial Rome, one of the great roles of his career. Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis completed the deal. In both films of Kubrick played with his usual intensity to an iron-willed hero, a noble leader who suffers in the end an unjust defeat.

Among the films produced by Douglas highlights another epic spectacle, Vikings (1962), by Richard Fleischer. Shot in Europe and starring Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine and Janet Leigh, as well as Douglas himself, was between the most violent movies of his filmography. During the sixties, thanks to the pole reached in Hollywood, had greater artistic and commercial control over their films, many of them produced by himself. During this period particularly stressed Seven Days in May (1964), John Frankenheimer, which played a patriotic officer dark personality that reveals a military plot to overthrow the president. This time also began to work occasionally on television.

In the seventies, because his strong personality led him to clash often with directors, took a chance and start directing his own films, debuted in this facet with Pegleg (1973), which was a resounding failure. Between his work as director noted Posse (1975), western convincing and devastating in returning to play a selfish and greedy.

None of the films starring Douglas since the seventies has been the impact of his earlier films, but the actor has managed to remain one of the first-rate performers of his generation. In recent years race has devoted much of his energies to the production and the writing of his autobiography, Ragman’s son and published in 1988.

In 1981 he received the Medal of Freedom, awarded by the U.S. president, and in 1985 the Legion of Honor of the Republic of France, in recognition of one of the greatest actors of the recent history of American cinema, able to interpret with equal intensity heroes or villains. In 1996, the Academy Awards was awarded an Oscar for his film career in 2001, the Berlin Film Festival awarded him the Golden Bear award in recognition of their professional career as an actor. Two years later, the patriarch of the clan Douglas starred alongside his son Michael It runs in the family.

Watch Kirk Douglas movies:

Catch Me a Spy

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

The Big Trees

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His father, a man of strong character belonging to the Episcopal Church, was representative of a chemical factory, so according to their destination, the family changed residence several times (Illinois, California, Minnesota) before settle permanently on a farm in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1937. From his mother, amateur artist and driving force behind a theater group of Omaha whereby, in the late twenties, spent a few still unknown Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire, inherited, he and his sisters, Josephine and Frances, his attraction the scene.

The glaring inconsistency of marriage resulted, after a short time, in a constant battle in the middle of Prohibition led to alcoholism women and children to emancipate themselves from a young age. Brando learned of the death of his mother in 1954 in a film set. His father soon remarried, died in 1965.

Rebel from childhood, the young Bud (was her family nickname) became sixteen, against their will in the Shattuck Military Academy in Fairbult, Minnesota, where far from “straightening” was expelled two years later for insubordination. Then forced to work in what was, was a mason and excavator driver while her sisters became independent and set off to New York to try his luck in the theater. In early 1943 he went to live with his sister Joselyn with the same goal, but to earn a living had to string a succession of odd jobs (selling soft drinks, dishwasher, buttons, elevator in a department store) while waiting for his chance.

A recommendation led him to Erwin Piscator, director of the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, the forerunner of the Actor’s Studio. There he attended classes Stella Adler, who enjoyed great prestige for having been a student in Moscow, Konstantin Stanislawski, whose techniques applied.

A dozen works between 1944 and 1947 (Molière, Shakespeare, Ben Hecht, Cocteau, Bernard Shaw …) burned up his talent, and two sentences were enough to convince that Tennessee Williams was to embody the ideal interpreter for first Once Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire. With the approval of the playwright and the direction of Elia Kazan, Brando was a Kowalski never surpassed, and the overnight Broadway got all talking about him.

The mounting success led to his film version. And the actor, who had debuted in Men (1950), Fred Zinnemann, was able to move the screen all the power and nuance with which he endowed his character in the scene, but its seductive power multiplied. With A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Marlon Brando not only gained immediate fame: her myth was born. An icon who imitated his contemporaries and that half a century later has not been extinguished.

As in his memoirs, Songs my mother taught meHe was not aware then of the scope of his image or the effect of their rebellion, which unwittingly strengthened in other titles, Wild! (1954), László Benedek, or Snakeskin (1959), Sidney Lumet. Another notable film of those years was The Young Lions (1958), which allowed Brando to show the versatility of interpretation to play the role of a captain of the German Wehrmacht, which gave a more human, which differed from that prevailing in the war films of the era.

The Brando of that time prevailed above all other considerations, his prestige as an actor. In six-year career had been nominated for an Oscar five times, and although I could have won by Viva Zapata! (1952), Kazan, or Julius Caesar (1953), Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as obtained by On the Waterfront (1954), in which he played the contradictory Terry Malloy (the former fighter who prowls the docks of New York), an alter ego of the film’s director, Kazan, haunted by the specter of betrayal after contributing to the sinister witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced his comrades. The actor hesitated long before accepting his role in that kind of film “Atonement, but owed much to Kazan, and smelled the character award.

Actually Brando, who embodied the faint-hearted disagreement over other Hollywood stars, I thought that worked against the star-system, behind the industry, and occurred, however, that his character suited the great dream factory: it was the best seller of its products. It is true that rejected many offers from Hollywood, but more saturated than ideology. This means a better job in the securities of varying quality and diverse genus, apart from demonstrating his versatility, not contribute to increase their prestige.

This was already in the fifties, when he was at the summit, and, eventually, it became increasingly evident. You can say that this first stage ended with his only job as director, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a western twilight set the tone for which has since ruled the genre, but which at the time were not valued.

A decade later, rescued from mediocrity by Bertolucci and Coppola, who with The Godfather led to a new Oscar-collected on its behalf by a false Sioux Indian protest the treatment of Native Americans-in the Brando reborn overcame greed, and Superman (1978), Richard Donner, with a salary of $ 14 million, opened its manifestly mercenaries and forgettable work that characterized the last stage of his career. His biographers say that he did so bound by debt.

Indeed, the economy was battered by their investments in Tahiti (Teti’aroa owned atoll since 1966) and sequels and obligations in store for the exotic, dramatic history dilated and sentimental (the false Hindu Anna Kashfi, Joanna Or actually ‘Callaghan, Welsh, with whom we litigated years for custody of her first child, Christian, who in 1990 was convicted for the murder of his sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend, who then committed suicide in 1995 -, the Mexican Movita Castaneda, the Tahitian Tarita Teriipia and, between 1988 and 2001, his Guatemalan housekeeper Cristhina Maria Ruiz, the mother of his three youngest children).

However, shortly after his death was announced on the will that left an estate of about $ 22 million and recognized ten of his children born of all your relationships. Of these, the ashes handed over by the will of the actor, on his island in Tahiti and California, in the Valley of Death.

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