Melvyn Douglas

Melvyn Douglas, born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg on April 5, 1901, in Macon, Georgia, was an American actor whose career in theatre, film, and television extended from the late 1920s until shortly before his death on August 4, 1981. He is among a select group of 24 performers to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award over the course of his career.

Douglas was the son of Lena Priscilla Hesselberg, a Protestant native of Tennessee and a Mayflower descendant, and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer who had emigrated from Riga, Latvia. His father's Jewish heritage was kept from Douglas during his childhood; he wrote in his 1987 autobiography, See You at the Movies, that he did not learn of his non-Christian background until his early teens, when paternal aunts disclosed the truth to him at age fourteen. Though his father taught music at colleges across the United States and Canada, Douglas never completed high school. He adopted the surname of his maternal grandmother and built his early acting skills through Shakespearean repertory work in his teens and with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa, Evansville, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan. He also served in the United States Army during World War I and later established an outdoor theatre in Chicago.

Douglas made his Broadway debut in 1928 and remained active on the New York stage through 1967. His early credits included A Free Soul and Back Here in 1928, followed by Now-a-Days in 1929. In 1930 he appeared in Recapture, and in 1931 he played the Unknown Gentleman in Tonight or Never, a production in which he appeared opposite actress Helen Gahagan, whom he married that same year. His Broadway work continued through the 1930s with No More Ladies in 1934, in which he played Sheridan Warren, and Mother Lode, also in 1934, in which he both performed and served as stager. Tapestry in Gray followed in 1935. After a period away from Broadway, he returned in the late 1940s and 1950s with productions including Two Blind Mice in 1949, The Bird Cage in 1950, Glad Tidings and The Little Blue Light in 1951, Time Out for Ginger in 1952, and a replacement run as Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind in 1955. He played General St. Pé in The Waltz of the Toreadors in 1958 and Captain Jack Boyle in Juno and Griffith P. Hastings in The Gang's All Here in 1959. His most celebrated stage achievement came in 1960, when he originated the lead role in Gore Vidal's The Best Man, earning the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Douglas came to prominence in Hollywood in 1929 as a suave leading man. He appeared opposite Greta Garbo in three films: As You Desire Me in 1932, Ninotchka in 1939, and Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman in 1941. He shared billing with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton in James Whale's The Old Dark House in 1932 and appeared in the horror film The Vampire Bat that same year. He starred in She Married Her Boss in 1935 and played a supporting role in Captains Courageous in 1937. He appeared with Joan Crawford in several films, most notably A Woman's Face in 1941. From 1952 to 1961, Douglas made no film appearances, directing his efforts instead toward stage and television. During that period he starred in the DuMont detective series Hollywood Off Beat from November 1952 to January 1953, briefly hosted the DuMont game show Blind Date in the summer of 1953, and hosted eleven episodes of the CBS Western anthology series Frontier Justice in the summer of 1959.

When Douglas returned to film in the 1960s, he transitioned into older and fatherly roles. He won his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hud in 1963 and received a nomination for Best Actor for I Never Sang for My Father in 1970. He won a second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Being There in 1979, though he declined to attend the 52nd Academy Awards ceremony, stating in one of his final interviews that he could not bear competing against child actor Justin Henry for Kramer vs. Kramer. He also appeared in The Americanization of Emily in 1964, Advance to the Rear in 1964, The Candidate in 1972, and an episode of The Fugitive in 1966. In addition to his film and stage honors, Douglas won a Primetime Emmy Award for his 1967 television role in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. His final complete screen appearance was in the 1981 horror film Ghost Story. He died before finishing his scenes for The Hot Touch, released in 1982, and the film was edited to account for his incomplete work. Douglas holds two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film at 6423 Hollywood Boulevard and one for television at 6601 Hollywood Boulevard.

During World War II, Douglas served first as director of the Arts Council in the Office of Civilian Defense and subsequently returned to the United States Army, rising to the rank of major in the Special Services Entertainment Production Unit. His granddaughter, actress Illeana Douglas, has noted that he first encountered his future Being There co-star Peter Sellers in Burma during the war, when Sellers was serving in the Royal Air Force. Douglas was also politically active throughout his life, serving on the State Central Committee of the California Democratic Party during the 1930s and 1940s and participating in the executive committee of the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East during the 1970s.

In his personal life, Douglas had previously been married to artist Rosalind Hightower, with whom he had a son, Gregory Hesselberg, born in 1926. Gregory Hesselberg is the father of actress Illeana Douglas. Following his 1931 marriage to Helen Gahagan, the couple traveled to Europe and were, by Douglas's account, deeply affected by the anti-Semitism they witnessed in France and Germany, which led both to become outspoken anti-fascists. Helen Gahagan Douglas later served three terms in Congress and was Richard Nixon's opponent in the 1950 California Senate race; it was she who popularized Nixon's nickname "Tricky Dick." The couple had two children together, Peter Gahagan Douglas, born in 1933, and Mary Helen Douglas, born in 1938. In 1938, they commissioned architect Roland Coate to design a one-story, 6,748-square-foot home on a three-acre lot in Outpost Estates, Los Angeles. Douglas and Helen Gahagan Douglas remained married until her death from cancer in 1980. Douglas died the following year, on August 4, 1981, of pneumonia and cardiac complications at Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City, at the age of eighty.