Before I Forget. Opens March 6; plays Fridays at 8 pm, Sundays at 2:00 pm; ends March 15. Tickets: $25. Kirk Douglas Theatre: 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City 90232. 213.628.2772

At 92, Kirk Douglas still dreams the impossible dream. Though he never played Cervantes’ legendary man of La Mancha, the Hollywood icon credits Don Quixote’s ideals for influencing his own surprising longevity.

“I always wanted to play that character,” Douglas admits one sunny afternoon at his Beverly Hills home, adding that a scrap-iron sculpture of the knight-errant stands watch in the garden of a second Montecito abode. Clad in a black cardigan sweater, blue jeans and slip-on sneakers, he exudes more benevolent grandfather than chivalrous Spaniard.

Seated on a peach and cream striped sofa in his elegantly understated living room, he spontaneously delivers several stanzas of the show’s signature song unconsciously shifting into performance mode: arms rising to punctuate the lyrics, body moving forward in unison and eyes shining brightly with the imagined quest ahead. For a brief moment, his white leonine hair framing the legendary profile, Don Quixote, famed fighter of windmills, kindred spirit to Spartacus and all the other champions Douglas has portrayed, commands the room.

Then, just as suddenly, Douglas sighs deeply and leans back against the couch. The slayer of dragons and Roman empires has departed the scene.

“It’s a wonderful story,” he enthuses, a fan of both the late Dale Wasserman’s musical and the earlier dramatic play on which it is based. “So romantic. And also, Don Quixote was an elderly gentleman. He was not a young man. He only acted like he was a young man. His dreams kept him alive. So I identify with it.”

Douglas is about to embark upon just such a long cherished dream when he returns to the stage for a four night run of a self penned solo show entitled Before I Forget beginning March 6 at his namesake theatre. He is first to point out the ironic pairing.

“People say, ‘Kirk, he’s so vain,’” he laughs. “‘He wants to say, ‘the Kirk Douglas Theatre presents Kirk Douglas!’ And they may be right. I have often joked that I didn’t want to be a movie actor; I wanted to be a star on the stage. Now I know how to do it. You build your own theatre!”

Written over a two-year period and directed by good friend Jeff Kanew, who helmed Douglas’ final screen pairing with Burt Lancaster in Tough Guys, the show is a life and film retrospective as seen from his nonagenarian viewpoint. Coincidentally the last time audiences saw Douglas on stage was in 1981 as an aged Tom Sawyer to Lancaster’s Huckleberry Finn in a pre-Broadway production of Bernard Sabath’s The Boys in Autumn in San Francisco.

“Someone said you should just call it Memories,” he notes. “I said that’s too somber. I don’t want to be so serious. I never have taken myself too seriously and I want to reflect that in my show.”

Despite the remnant limitations a 1996 stroke has placed upon his speaking voice, Douglas remains optimistic about the evening’s reception.

“I am very excited to be doing this,” he explains. “It’s a challenge to me to handle it with my speech impediment but I like the challenge. I will see if I will meet it. Listen, what can you do if you’re 92 years old and have impaired speech? You do a one-man show!”

A Life of Challenges

Conquering adversity has been the cornerstone of Kirk Douglas’ well-documented life. Born the son of poor illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants, he became an international star and independent producer known for such film classics as Champion, Detective Story, The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life, Spartacus, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Lonely are the Brave and Paths to Glory. He famously helped break the Hollywood blacklist by giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit for writing Spartacus.

A civil rights activist and global humanitarian, Douglas served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.S. State Department and was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. Other nations followed suit, including France which named him the Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, adding to a countless list of awards that include the National Medal of the Arts, an honorary Oscar and The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He is the best-selling author of nine books including his 1988 autobiography The Ragman’s Son, My Stoke of Luck and most recently, Let’s Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning. For more than four decades, his Douglas Foundation has made substantial contributions to civic and charitable causes including the Los Angeles Mission for the Homeless, which opened the Anne Douglas Center for Women, the Motion Picture Relief Home’s Alzheimer’s Unit, which has been named “Harry’s Haven” after his father, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

In 1997, they established the Anne & Kirk Douglas Playground Award to provide assistance to the Los Angeles Unified School District to enhance their schools’ outdoor and recreational spaces. Last May, they reached their goal of renovating 400 playgrounds and were honored by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

An Off Stage Echo

Despite six decades of international fame, Douglas still regrets not becoming a Broadway star. As he notes in Let’s Face It, it was not for lack of “trying his best.” Douglas studied drama at St. Lawrence University, did summer stock with Karl Malden between school years and earned a scholarship to New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He made his Broadway debut in Spring Awakening as a singing telegram boy but more vividly recalls a subsequent role in one of the most publicized productions of the 1942 season–a revival of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters starring Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon. The trio graced the cover of Time magazine, which called the women and their supporting actors, “the most glittering cast the theater has seen, commercially, in this generation.”

“I played an ‘off stage echo,’” he reveals with an impish smile. “The actor on stage who was playing the part I wanted to play, a young soldier, is going off to war and he’s saying goodbye to the trees around his house.” Douglas cups his hand to his mouth, calling out, “‘Yo Ho!’ Then offstage, I would say, ‘Yo Ho!’” He demonstrates again, offering a perfect match to the first.

“But I was always on key,” Douglas emphasizes. “People used to laugh because they saw me preparing to be an off stage echo. It’s more difficult than you think!”

Landing the opportunity to work with the famed Cornell and her noted director husband Guthrie McClintic illustrated to Douglas the promise of his parents’ chosen homeland. “I remember my first Thanksgiving day in New York trying to get a meal from the Salvation Army in the Bowery. By the second Thanksgiving, I was at Katharine Cornell’s house seated next to Tallulah Bankhead. As my mother often said, ‘only in America.’”

Hollywood & Mike Wallace

World War II interrupted Douglas’ fledgling stage career. He enlisted in the Navy, returning to Broadway in 1945 in such shows as Kiss and Tell, Alice in Arms and The Wind is Ninety. Fellow ADA classmate Lauren Bacall sent producer Hal Wallis to watch Douglas perform. Impressed, he subsequently offered him a screen test. Douglas was cast in the 1946 melodrama The Strange Love of Martha Ivers opposite Barbara Stanwyck and the rest is cinematic history.

Eleven years later in 1957, Mike Wallace talked to Douglas about that transition to Hollywood on his show The Mike Wallace Interview that ran from 1957 to 1962. Wallace donated the kinescopes and related materials for the show’s first two seasons to the Henry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin who made them available online last year.

Filmed in Munich, where the international box office star and producer had just completed principal photography for his epic The Vikings, a chain smoking Wallace grilled Douglas about what lured actors to Hollywood. Was it, quoting The New York Post columnist Max Lerner, “money, beauty, acclaim and the dream of love?”

“The thing that lured me to Hollywood was at the time I was broke,” Douglas flatly states. “I never had any intentions of being a movie star. I never thought I was the type. My only aim was to become a stage actor, so it was a very simple thing. At one time I wrote a check out for $15, the check came back, no funds and I know enough about economics to know that I was broke. At that time, someone had asked me to come to Hollywood so I thought I’d take a chance.”

Wallace next read Douglas an excerpt from a 1953 Coronet magazine interview he gave as a young actor which described how “Douglas would stand in Central Park alone and look up at the topmost floor of the swank hotels, watch the twinkling lights, wonder who the people were in those rooms, wondered what they were doing and vowed he would be in one of those suites himself one day.”

“So that’s what I mean, when I say, ‘What lures actors to Hollywood, money, beauty, acclaim, the dream of love?’” pushes Wallace again.

“Well, I think that part of it is true but that might have been fulfilled on the New York stage,” counters Douglas. “Had I been successful instead of in consistent flops, I might have been able to get into that penthouse in a New York hotel by working on the New York stage.”

When asked to comment about the interview now 52 years later, Douglas replies, “I gave that answer? Listen, I went back to Broadway. I bought a book called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and paid Dale Wasserman to make a play out of it. I played in it for six months but I didn’t bowl over the critics. So I decided to be a serious actor, which I always will be.”

Flying Over a Cuckoo’s Nest

So iconic is Jack Nicholson’s Oscar winning performance in the 1975 film that few people remember it was Douglas who originated the role of Randle P. McMurphy on Broadway 12 years earlier. He loved the 1962 Ken Kesey novel and thought it would make a perfect vehicle for a triumphant return to the New York stage following the worldwide success of Spartacus.

Douglas asked Wasserman, who at that time had written his film The Vikings as well as several lauded television plays including I, Don Quixote but who had yet to pen Man of La Mancha, to tackle it. Wasserman immersed himself in the subject, visiting six institutions ranging from a posh mental clinic in New York to a classic snake pit in Georgia as well as having himself committed for two weeks.

Produced by David Merrick and directed by Alex Segal, the play opened November 13, 1963 at the Cort Theatre. The cast featured Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbit, William Daniels as Dale Harding, Ed Ames as Chief Bromden and Joan Tetzel as Nurse Ratched. It ran for a total of 82 performances. The critics held nothing back.

“Do you find the quips, pranks and wiles of the inmates of a mental hospital amusing? If you do, you should have a merry old time at One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” wrote Howard Taubman of The New York Times.

Undaunted, Douglas tried for 10 years to get a film version made with himself in the lead. In 1974, son Michael finally asked if he could take a crack at it. A year later he co-produced with Saul Zaentz what would become the first film in 40 years to sweep all five of the top Academy Awards categories. Ironically, his father had met director Milos Forman years earlier in Prague and had sent Forman a copy of the book which he claimed never got past the communist censors.

“Michael made it into a hit,” admits the senior Douglas. “Everybody got an Oscar and I didn’t get to play the part I wanted to play. Milos said I was too old. They gave it to a young actor, Jack Nicholson. So the first time I saw it, I said now I shall see how terrible this guy is. Of course he was wonderful. He was much better than I would have been.”

LA Theatre & Old Hollywood

Today Douglas is more concerned with giving young actors a start in the theatre that bears his name than preserving his own stage legacy. He and wife Anne, a longtime Center Theatre Group board member, donated $2.5 million alongside additional funding from Michael to help complete the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

“The theatre has changed the complexion completely of Culver City,” he notes proudly. “New stores, new restaurants. It pleases me. I always see the productions and most of them I have liked very much.”

Since opening in 2004, the 317-seat theatre has presented five seasons of world premiere works including such musicals as Sleeping Beauty Wakes (with Deaf West Theatre), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and a workshop production of 13, which moved to the Mark Taper Forum a year later before embarking on a limited Broadway run that ended in January.

“I thought 13 was very good and I supported it,” states Douglas. “To me that’s a good example of the real purpose of the theatre–to give young people a start. Now it gives the old actors a start, too!”

When asked what he thinks about young actors who exit drama school only to bypass theatre entirely to pursue more lucrative television or film careers, Douglas is unflinchingly pragmatic.

“I have nothing against that. I say you do what you have to do. I have always had the romantic impression of the theatre. Now, let’s face it. There’s a lot of good work on TV and film. In many ways, movies are more difficult than the stage. On stage you have the beginning, middle and end. I have done movies where you shot the ending first. Some people don’t learn that soon enough. When you make a movie, you have to have a concept of the entire movie. So you’re prepared if they go in the middle or wherever. You have to have a plan in your mind of how you’re doing the whole thing.”

But how does he rate his peers from the golden age of Hollywood or Broadway versus those on the scene today? Were they truly “bigger” then or have we the public mythologized their talent via rose colored glasses?

“I laugh at the ‘good old days,’” says Douglas. “I mean there are always good actors in any period. Marlon Brando. Robert DeNiro. Al Pacino. Now you have actors like John Lithgow. Robert Downey, Jr. Styles change. Time marches on. We look at things differently. I’m talking to young people now. I don’t have any interest in people in their 90s!”

Blogging at 92

Today Douglas reaches thousands of those young people every week via the MySpace page he launched exactly two years ago this month to promote Let’s Face It, making him the oldest celebrity blogger on the popular social networking site with upwards of 6,075 “friends.” The initial outpouring of response took him by surprise, leading Douglas to use his newly found platform to encourage his grandchildren’s generation to participate in political issues such as petitioning the U.S. government to make a formal apology for slavery.

“I continue my blog because I love the idea of a man of my age relating to younger people,” he acknowledges. “Every week I will write something about what I think and how I feel. I receive hundreds of replies. Even though technically I don’t know anything about using a computer, I appreciate the power that it has. Now you can talk to anybody in any part of the world. Kids do it all the time.”

So what words of wisdom can he pass on from his 92-year-old vantage point?

“I would encourage people to hesitate before they make final judgments on anything. To be more receptive. I think that’s a good word. A few years ago I would never have expected a black man to be president. It all changes. We have to be receptive to those changes.

“I don’t try to be a wise old man. I’ve already learned more from young people than I want them to learn from me.”

Feature Image courtesy of ©Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging