America has always loved a rags-to-riches story and Hollywood has duly obliged churning out hundreds of them over the decades.

None, however, could be as compelling as the real-life story of one of his biggest stars, Kirk Douglas, who has died aged 103.

In this case the rags are not metaphorical but the real thing, which Douglas’s father sold from his horse-drawn wagon in Amsterdam, New York.

“Even in Eagle Street, the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung of the ladder,” recalled Douglas in his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son.

It takes a huge amount of energy to haul yourself up from the bottom but Douglas had it in spades. Whatever it took to get out and up in the world, he would do it. He sold snacks to workers, delivered newspapers, worked as a gardener and janitor and even as a wrestler. He reckoned he did close to 40 jobs before finally getting his acting break.

Although he had caught the acting bug at high school, he could not afford to study. But his determination convinced the Dean at St Lawrence University to give him a loan, which was followed later on by a scholarship at the New York City’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

There his good looks and energy made him stand out and caught the attention of two fellow actresses who would end up playing important roles in his life. Diana Hill would become his first wife while Betty Joan Perske, later to achieve movie stardom herself under the name Lauren Bacall, would be instrumental in launching his movie career.

Bacall had recognised his acting talent early on. She had also, by her own admission developed a “wild”, one-sided crush on him but the two remained good friends throughout the next few years which saw Douglas serve in the US Navy during WWII and marry Diana Hill.

Douglas had also been busy with radio, commercials and even soap operas work and carved a successful career in the theatre after starring in Kiss and Tell. When Bacall heard that director Hal Wallis was looking for a young male actor to star in his upcoming movie, she recommended him.

Although in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) he played against type as a weak and insecure man, he still managed to radiate an intensity and charisma that made critics and audiences alike sit up and notice.

But it was in his role as a boxer in the 1949 Champion that the famous Douglas snarl was first deployed to devastating effect; the movie also gained Douglas the first of his three Oscar nominations and established him as a major box office draw.

Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch, the son of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, Bryna (Bertha) Sanglel and Herschel (Harry). Herschel had been a horse trader back home but became a ragman to support his wife, son and five daughters when he moved to the US. Like his brother, who had arrived in the country earlier, he changed his surname to Demsky and Issur was known as Izzy Demsky.

The family lived in a poor, rough neighbourhood in Amsterdam, where one had to be tough to survive and Harry Demsky was the toughest of them all, always getting into fights. Izzy, desperate for his father’s approval, if not his affection, often got into scrapes too.

He also started to distance himself from Judaism and when some members of the community tried to convince him to become a rabbi (apparently he was very good in cheder), he “worked very hard to get out of it”. It would take him many years and a life-changing event to realise that “you don’t have to be a rabbi to be a Jew”.

Izzy was, Douglas would recall years later, an angry young man who wanted, more than anything, to prove himself to a father who even at the peak of his son’s success, never acknowledged it.

But his mother and sisters gave young Izzy an abundance of love. Bryna, especially, kept telling him “gamble on yourself”. He never forgot that advice and when he started his own production company in 1955 he named it ‘Bryna Productions’ after his mother.

By then he had already notched up another Oscar nomination, for The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952, and felt confident enough of his pulling power to break his existing contracts and start producing his own films. The move made sense: Douglas had always had a rather robust attitude to the movie-making process and was not afraid of taking on directors if he felt it necessary – as he did with Stanley Kubrick in 1957's Paths of Glory.

Besides Kubrick, another of his most successful collaborations was with Vincent Minnelli who directed him in Lust for Life (1956), where his compelling portrait of Vincent van Gogh’s tortured artist soul and explosive physicality won him his third Oscar nomination.

In the next few years, the hits kept on coming with Douglas increasingly doubling up as producer as in the 1960 swords-and-sandals epic Spartacus, where his decision to employ and credit blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is thought to have spelt the end of the Hollywood blacklist of professionals deemed to be Communist sympathisers.

Even later on in life Douglas never seemed to tire of acting and worked extensively in film and TV. A severe stroke in 1996 was a serious setback, but, with the help of voice therapy, he recovered.

He also strived tirelessly to promote freedom and democracy throughout the world and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 for his efforts. A committed philanthropist, he and his second wife Anne gave away tens of millions of dollars to various organisations.

Over the years he also started making peace with his Jewishness. When filming The Juggler in Israel in1953, he found it “wonderful, finally, to be in the majority”.

Later on he would praise Israel as “the only successful democracy in the Middle East”. But it was his near-miraculous escape from a helicopter crash in 1991 that took him on a spiritual journey that led him firmly back to Judaism and he had a second Bar-mitzvah in 1999 at the age of 83.

Kirk Douglas married first Diana Douglas in 1943. They were divorced in 1951. He subsequently married Anne Buydens in 1954.

She survives him together with three children, two – Michael and Joel – from his first marriage and one, Peter, from his second. Another son, Eric, predeceased him.

Kirk Douglas. Born December 9 1916. 
Died February 5 2020