97 year-old Kirk Douglas sat down and tapped out a short tribute piece for The Hollywood Reporter about the recently-passed Lauren Bacall, whom Douglas first met in 1940 when they were attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Douglas was 24, Bacall was 16…I won’t ask. In ’46 Douglas’s lead performance in The Wind Is Ninety, a Broadway play, won good reviews. At an L.A. party Bacall told producer Hal Wallis to see it for Douglas’s sake and “he actually listened to her,” Douglas writes. “Did I mention she was persuasive? Soon after I was on my way to Hollywood with a meaty role as Barbara Stanwyck‘s husband in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” Which, by the way, is a fairly dreadful film. But it led to Out of the Past and, in ’49, Champion.
