arts & life

Celebrity Jews

LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT GIFT?

Available at the box offi ce.

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

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52 December 8 • 2016

Michael, Dylan and Kirk Douglas

KIRK DOUGLAS TURNS 100
As I write this, Kirk Douglas’ 100th
birthday (Dec. 9) is just days away, and,
God willing, he’ll celebrate it with family
and friends. Here are some tidbits about
Douglas unlikely to be in most birthday
celebration articles.
Born Issur Danielovitch, the son of a
ragman, Douglas had a remarkable run
of quality hit movies from the late 1940s
through the mid ’60s. Less well known
is that he was the producer as well as
the star of two great movies: Spartacus
and Paths of Glory. He hired a virtually
unknown Stanley Kubrick to direct those
films. He also hired blacklisted writer
Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus and
gave him screen credit — a mortal blow
to the blacklist.
Douglas starred in the first Hollywood
film made in Israel, The Juggler (1953).
This story of a Holocaust survivor starts
dour but ultimately offers a hopeful look
at the then-new country. A near death
experience in 1991 started the intellectual
process that led Kirk to embrace rigor-
ous Jewish practice — and he had his
second bar mitzvah, age 83, in 1999. His
wife of 62 years, Anne Buydens, now 86,
converted to Judaism in 2004. It must be
gratifying for Kirk that Michael, 72, the
most famous of his four sons, decided in
the last few years to firmly identify as a
Jew. Michael was led to this largely by his
own son, Dylan, now 15, who expressed
a sincere wish to be Jewish and have a bar
mitzvah (which happened in Jerusalem).
Last year, on his 99th birthday, Kirk
gave $15 million to build a larger center
for Alzheimer’s patients at the Motion
Picture & Television Home. This is on top
of $25 million Douglas has already given
the Home. This is his most famous charity,
but there are scores of others.
I suspect part of Kirk’s fortune stems
from his foresight in buying up (in 1962)
the rights to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s

Nest — he starred in the first dramatiza-
tion of the novel (1963). His Broadway
play co-star was Gene Wilder. He couldn’t
get a studio to make the book into a
film and eventually lent the film rights to
Michael. Cuckoo won the Oscar for best
picture (1975) and Michael, as producer,
got that Oscar. It cost $3 million to make
and earned $170 million (over $750
million today).

Jones

RASHIDA AND BUBBLES
Back in 2011, actress Rashida Jones,
now 40, told Playboy that when she
was about 12 years old, she became
friends with Michael Jackson, 18 years
her senior. Jackson, she said, would
enlist her in hijinks like “supersoaking”
a movie line crowd. But, sometimes,
Jones recently told a Viceland talk show,
Jackson’s “weirdnesses” could be dan-
gerous.
You probably remember Bubbles,
Jackson’s chimp, whom he dressed up
in kids’ clothes and gave the run of his
estate. Well, Jones said that she was
trying to get Bubbles to behave and
Bubbles looked her straight in the eye
and then bit down so hard on her hand
that blood gushed everywhere. Jones
showed that she still bears a bite scar
and Bubbles, she said, looked proud of
what he’d done.

*

