Kirk Douglas — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, in December 1916 - the fourth of seven children and the only son of Bryna Sanglel and Herschel Danielovitch, Jewish emigrants from Chavusy in Mogilev Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Belarus. They had arrived in the United States around 1910. Yiddish was the language of the house.
The name changed twice before it settled. An uncle who had emigrated earlier was using Demsky, and the family took it too, so the boy grew up as Izzy Demsky. He became Kirk Douglas by legal change shortly before entering the United States Navy in the Second World War, where he served as a lieutenant junior grade until 1944.
His father had been a horse trader in Chavusy. In upstate New York he bought a horse and a small cart and became a ragman, buying scrap cloth and metal for pennies - the trade that gave Douglas the title of his 1988 memoir, The Ragman's Son. The family lived at the bottom of a sloping street on the east side of town, by the factories, the railroad and the Mohawk River. He sold newspapers, wrestled competitively, waited tables and worked as a bellboy, and hitchhiked some two hundred miles north to St Lawrence University.
He made his first film in 1946 and his reputation with Champion in 1949, which brought the first of three Academy Award nominations for best actor. Across some ninety films he became one of the defining figures of the studio era - Ace in the Hole, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Seven Days in May - and worked increasingly as his own producer. On Spartacus in 1960 he insisted that Dalton Trumbo be credited under his own name, a decision widely regarded as instrumental in ending the Hollywood blacklist.
He wrote eleven books, survived a helicopter crash in 1991 and a stroke in 1996, and turned in later life to religious study and philanthropy. The American Film Institute placed him seventeenth among the male stars of classic Hollywood, and by the end he was the highest-ranked living person on that list. He died in Beverly Hills in February 2020, aged 103. His son Michael Douglas is an actor and producer.
"Parents emigrated from Chavusy, Mogilev Governorate, c. 1910"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Chavusy (Belarus)
The surname changed twice in America - Danielovitch to Demsky, taken from an uncle who had emigrated earlier, and then legally to Douglas before he entered the US Navy in the Second World War.
Born Issur Danielovitch. His parents Herschel Danielovitch and Bryna Sanglel emigrated around 1910 from Chavusy in Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Belarus. His father had been a horse trader there and became a scrap-and-rag dealer in Amsterdam, New York.
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Chavusy (Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I am the son of an illiterate ragman who couldn't read or write. That's who I am."