Kirk Douglas

Born Issur Danielovitch in 1916, Douglas clawed out of poverty and into his film debut opposite Barbara Stanwyck in 1946. Champion three years later earned him his first Oscar nomination and established the template: explosive, unscrupulous, magnetic. Through the 1950s he racked up two more nominations - for The Bad and the Beautiful and for playing Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, which won him a Golden Globe - and became the 17th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood according to AFI. At 32 he founded Bryna Productions and began steering his own course, hiring a young Stanley Kubrick for Paths of Glory and Spartacus, then crediting blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo on the latter in defiance of the studio system. He bought the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on Broadway in 1963 and handed them to his son Michael, who turned it into an Oscar winner. A helicopter crash in 1991 and a stroke in 1996 slowed him, but he kept working into his eighties and died in 2020 at 103, one of the last men standing from the era he helped define.