We celebrate the 100th birthday of Kirk Douglas, Hollywood icon, three-time nominee who won a Golden Globe as Best Actor for Lust for Life (1957), as well as the HFPA's highest honor, the Cecil B. deMille award in 1968.This year the actor and producer  also marks 70 years in Hollywood: his first movie was the noir The Strange Lives of Martha Ivers, (1946).

Douglas is one of the few stars of Hollywood's 'Golden Age’ still with us, and still active. He last appeared on the screen just eight years ago, in Empire State Building Murder (2008), appropriately a tribute in doc-crime-drama form celebrating American film noir. It recaptures the time and place of New York in the 1930s and 40s  when Douglas was an unknown, struggling actor in Manhattan.

His beginnings could not have been more humble. He was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, to Jewish immigrants from what today is Belarus. (He changed his name when he enlisted during World War II). The immigrant life, raising six daughters and one son, was hard on the Danielovitchs, as Douglas would later describe in his 1988 autobiography, "The Ragman's Son": "My father, … became a ragman, buying old rags, pieces of metal, and junk for pennies, …. Even in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman's son."

Growing up in abject poverty in tenement New York, Douglas worked at more than forty different jobs, he wrote, before getting a job acting "I was dying to get out. In a sense, (acting) lit a fire under me." He performed in kindergarten , acted in high school, took loans to study acting in college, and got a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. A classmate and sometimes date, Betty Joan Persky, another young Jewish thespian later better known as Lauren Bacall, helped him get his first Hollywood film role when she recommended Douglas to director Hal Wallis, who cast him opposite Barbara Stanwyck in his Martha Ivers. The critics and the public welcomed the young unknown, and Douglas never looked back.

Douglas reflected on his Hollywood career when he spoke to the Huffington Post two years ago, on the publication of his "Life Could Be Verse":

"Over some 70 years, I made about 90 feature films, …. I have forgotten most of them, and so has the public. However, I am proud of (…) Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Seven Days in May, and my favorite of all, Lonely Are the Brave. A few films are sentimental favorites that mark meaningful times in my off-screen life and milestones in my rise to stardom. Others are meaningful to me because, while entertaining the public, they also gave insight into serious issues."

(In that book) Douglas, who was also nominated for Globes in 1952 (Detective Story) and 1986 (Amos), listed his all-time favorites:
Champion  (1949) : “It was a turning point in my young career. movie realism! Champion got me a Best Actor nomination for an Oscar and made me a star”.

Ace in the Hole (1951): “I again played the self-serving bad guy in Billy Wilder’s drama about a disgraced journalist trying to reinvent his big career in small-town Albuquerque. …(Ace) was not a hit at the time, but it became a cult favorite.”

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952): “Wasn’t I lucky that Clark Gable turned down the role, since it earned me my second Academy nomination?  …(I was playing a) ruthless, selfish character  — still another tough-guy antihero. I was doing well with these roles.”

Act of Love (1953): “I don’t know if this is a good film, but to me it’s a great film because that’s where I met my wife, Anne Buydens, to whom I have been married for 60 years.”

Lust for Life (1956): “I wanted to play Van Gogh,…but it was also horrible. I became so immersed in his tortured life that it was hard to pull back. In makeup I looked like him. Sometimes I would reach my hand up to touch my ear to make sure it was still there.” (Douglas, who never won an Oscar, was nominated Best Actor by the Academy for this movie. He did however win a Golden Globe).

Paths of Glory (1957): "A young director named Stanley Kubrick ..  gave it to me  and I loved it even though I knew it would never be a commercial success….. I was right. It didn’t make money, but it was a critical success. I found Stanley to be supremely talented but extremely difficult. With a bigger budget and a bigger payday on Spartacus, he became twice as difficult, but what a talent!”

Spartacus (1960): “Our screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, working under the pseudonym ‘Sam Jackson’ because he was on Hollywood’s notorious blacklist. What a shameful period that was, especially since we were all hypocrites, hiring the blacklisted to use their talents at reduced wages. Spartacus was a demanding movie, and I was crucified not only on screen but off of it, by the likes of powerful columnist Hedda Hopper and the American Legion, for using a book written by Howard Fast, a Communist, and giving Dalton screen credit. But the public embraced it,”

Lonely Are the Brave (1962): “This is my favorite movie. I love the theme that if you try to be an individual, society will crush you. I play a modern-day cowboy still living by the code of the Old West. Dalton wrote a perfect screenplay — one draft, no revisions.”

Seven Days in May (1964): “I did enjoy playing a nice guy for a change. … Seven Days in May had its first sneak preview the night I closed in the play of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which limped along for five months — my final attempt to make it as a major Broadway star.
 
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975): “And that brings me to… a movie I neither produced nor starred in despite all my best efforts. My son Michael asked if he could take a crack at producing it, so I gave him the rights, not at all sure whether he would have any more luck than I did. Well, it opened to raves, and on Academy Awards night, the film won all five major Oscars. I couldn’t have been prouder of Michael, even though he wouldn’t let me play McMurphy. “You’re too old,” he said. And this was in 1975, some 40 years ago! I forgave him. Jack Nicholson was superb.”
Today Douglas is still very much active in charity endeavors and in his other creative passion: an author of some 19 books, Douglas published his most recent title two years ago, on his 98th birthday."Life Could Be Verse: Reflections on Love, Loss, and What Really Matters" is  an intimate look into his life, through a collection of poetry, prose and photographs, illuminating the high  and lows of his personal and professional life.

And what a life it has been!
To us at the HFPA and to film lovers everywhere, Kirk Douglas is a big part of why we love movies. Today we join all of Hollywood and his legions of fans worldwide in saying:

Happy birthday Kirk Douglas. Golden Globes honoree and Hollywood icon!