Kirk Douglas: Hollywood's impossibly handsome Colossus of Rhodes
As an actor, he blazed with a hyperreal masculinity as well as heart-on-sleeve passion
“I’m Spartacus!” — “I’m Spartacus!”— “I’M SPARTACUS!” Every film buff knows that moment, every panel show comedian riffs on it. The scene is from the 1960 movie starring Kirk Douglas, the last major survivor of the Hollywood golden age who died on Wednesday aged 103: he was impossibly handsome, virile and inimitably dimpled.
A crowd of defeated slave rebels in the pre-Christian Roman empire are told their wretched lives will be spared but only if their ringleader, Spartacus, comes out and gives himself up to be executed. Just as he is about to sacrifice himself, one slave, Antoninus (played by Tony Curtis) jumps up and claims to be Spartacus, then another, and another, then all of them, a magnificent display of solidarity, while the man himself allows a tear to fall in closeup.
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