Melvyn Douglas

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Melvyn Douglas (born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg, 1901-born), was an American actor.

Douglas came to prominence in the 1930s as a suave leading man, perhaps best represented in Greta Garbo's 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka.

Douglas performed mature and fatherly characters in his Academy Award-nominated appearances in Hud (1963) and Being There (1979) and his Academy Award-nominated role in I Never Sang for My Father (1970).

Douglas appeared in films with supernatural tales involving ghosts in the first few years of his life.

In his last completed film role, Douglas appeared in The Changeling and Ghost Story in 1980 and 1981.

Early life

Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford) and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Riga, Latvia, and then a part of Russia. His mother, a native of Tennessee, was a Mayflower descendant.

Douglas wrote about his Jewish roots in his autobiography, See You at the Movies (1987), before he began to fear his Jewish roots until later in his youth: "I didn't know about the non-Christian portion of my family history until his early teens," as his parents preferred to deny their Jewish roots. It was his aunts, on his father's side, who told him "the truth" when he was 14 years old. He writes that he "adored them unstintingly" and that his parents treated him like a son.

Douglas never graduated from high school, though his father, a well-known concert pianist, taught music at a number of colleges around the United States and Canada. Melvyn Douglas took the surname of his maternal grandmother and became known as Melvyn Douglas.

Personal life

Douglas was married briefly to artist Rosalind Hightower, and they had one child, (Melvyn) Gregory Hesselberg, 1926. Hesselberg, an artist, is the father of actress Illeana Douglas.

Douglas married actress-turned-politician Helen Gahagan in 1931. "They were horrified by French and German anti-Semitism" when they arrived in Europe the same year. As a result, they became outspoken anti-fascists.

Gahagan, a three-term Congresswoman, was Richard Nixon's replacement for the United States Senate seat from California in 1950. Because of her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Nixon accused Gahagan of being soft on Communism. Nixon went so far as to call her "pink right down to her underwear." It was Gahagan who popularized Nixon's epithet "Tricky Dick" in Nixon's parody.

In 1938, the couple hired architect Roland Coate to create a house for them on a three-acre parcel they owned in Outpost Estates, Los Angeles. The result, according to the architects, was a one-story, 6,748-square-foot home.

Douglas and Gahagan had two children, Peter Gahagan Douglas (1933) and Mary Helen Douglas (1938). The couple were married until Helen Gahagan Douglas' death in 1980 from cancer. Melvyn Douglas died a year later, in 1981, at the age of 80, from pneumonia and heart disease in New York City.

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Career

Douglas began acting in Shakespearean repertory as a youngster and with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa, Evansville, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan. In World War I, he served in the US Army in World War I. In Chicago, he founded an outdoor theatre. He had a long career in theatre, film, and television, extending from his 1930 Broadway appearance in Tonight or Never (opposite his future wife, Helen Gahagan) to just before his death. In James Whale's sardonic horror masterpiece The Old Dark House in 1932, Douglas shared top billing with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton.

He was the hero in the 1932 horror film The Vampire Bat and the savvy leading man in 1935's She Married Her Boss. He appeared in many films, most notably A Woman's Face (1941), and Greta Garbo's final film Two-Faced Woman (1941). In Captains Courageous (1937), one of his most sympathetic parts was as the belatedly alert father.

Douglas was first as a director of the Arts Council in the Office of Civilian Defense during World War II, and he later served in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major. According to Illeana Douglas' granddaughter, it was in Burma when he first learned of his destiny. Being There co-star Peter Sellers, who was in the Royal Air Force during the war, was in Burma. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and The Sea of Grass have both starred in Mr. Blandings and Mr. Blandings' Builds His Dream House. He made his musical debut in the ill-fated Marc Blitzstein musical Juno, which was based on Seán O'Casey's Juno and Paycock's.

Douglas appeared on DuMont's detective show Steve Randall (1953 to 1952) before then being transferred to CBS in November 1952. He appeared on the DuMont game show Blind Date for a brief period of time in 1953. Douglas hosted eleven original episodes of a CBS Western anthology television series called Frontier Justice, which was part of Dick Powell's Four Star Television in the summer of 1959.

Douglas took on older-man and fatherly roles in films including Hud (1963), The Americanization of Emily (1964), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor (1970) and The Candidate (1972). For the comedy-drama Being There (1979), he received his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Douglas, on the other hand, revealed in one of his final interviews that he did not attend the 52nd Academy Awards because he couldn't bear competing against kid actor Justin Henry for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Douglas received a Tony Award for his 1965 role in Gore Vidal's The Best Man by Gore Vidal's Broadway lead role, as well as an Emmy for his 1967 role in Do Not Go Gentle In That Good Night.

Douglas' last completed screen appearance was in the film Ghost Story (1981). He did not finish shooting all of his scenes for his film The Hot Touch (1982) before his death; the film had to be cut to compensate for Douglas' incomplete role.

Douglas has two actors on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies on 6423 Hollywood Blvd. At 6601 Hollywood Blvd., there are two televisions and one for television at 6601.

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