This past June, in a restaurant in New York, there was a sight to warm the heart and soul of any dedicated movie maven who happened to be in the same star-studded place that night: sitting together, sharing time, food, laughter and memories were the iconic Kirk Douglas and his wife Anne, breaking bread with fellow film icon Lauren Bacall--old friends and former costars, still strongly connected. It had been sixty-one years earlier that Douglas and Bacall had so charismatically shared movie screens, along with Doris Day, in 1950's Young Man with a Horn, a movie we'll be showing on September 13 as part of our month-long tribute to the unsinkable Kirk. (Compared to Kirk D., the unsinkable Molly Brown was as fragile as Kleenex.)

What made that sight at the restaurant so heartwarming is the fact it was Bacall who was responsible for Kirk's entry into films so many years earlier. It happened at a Hollywood party in the mid-1940s when Bacall--then a newcomer in town and the toast of it thanks to her dynamic debut in 1944's To Have and Have Not--was in a group listening to then-independent producer Hal Wallis lamenting the lack of exciting, new, young leading men coming up through the Hollywood ranks. Always one to speak her mind, Bacall told Wallis he should have a look at her friend Kirk Douglas, a young actor back in New York, someone she'd known since the days when she, like Kirk, was struggling to find work in the theater. "You should check him out," she told Wallis. "He'd be a great bet for you."

It wasn't long after that Kirk was not only in the film capital but also under contract to Wallis and making his first movie, Wallis' 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, with Kirk playing the weak husband of a lethal Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas wasn't an overnight sensation but he did gain attention and respect in his first batch of movies, many of which you can also see on September 6. It only took three short years until he was a major player, and soon after an Oscar® nominee, then an independent producer himself working with the cream of the crop directors (Wilder, Wyler, Minnelli, Hawks, Huston, Kubrick, Kazan among them).

As an actor, he continued to follow a career design that worked particularly well for him. Like his friend/competitor Burt Lancaster, Douglas alternated between making an action movie for the masses (guaranteeing surefire top grosses) followed by a film for the artier crowd (guaranteeing respect from critics and more discriminating moviegoers).

But, I must say, for all the fine work he's done in films for the past 65 years, I never admired him more than when he was our guest at last April's TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, where he did a Q&A session with me before a screening of his 1960 epic Spartacus. Refusing to be hampered by recent bouts of ill health, he was at once charming, self-effacing, funny, thoughtful, positive and--no better words for it--absolutely heroic, working without a net and giving the audience 100 percent of Kirk Douglas, exactly as he'd done in films from the beginning. It was my shortcoming to have expected anything less from this amazingly vital man of only 94.

by Robert Osborne