Melvyn Douglas

Melvyn Douglas (born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg, April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981) was an American actor, whose stage and screen careers spanned from the 1930s until the early 1980s. He was one of 24 performers to win the Triple Crown of Acting - winning two Academy Awards (both in the Best Supporting Actor category), a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award.

He came to prominence in 1929 as a suave leading man, perhaps best typified by his performance in the romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939) with Greta Garbo, and appeared in many films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Douglas later played mature and fatherly characters, as in his Oscar-winning performances in Hud (1963) and Being There (1979) and his Oscar–nominated performance in I Never Sang for My Father (1970). He won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Gore Vidal's play The Best Man (1960).

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 emigrant from Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. His mother, a native of Tennessee, was Protestant and a Mayflower descendant.

Douglas, in his autobiography, See You at the Movies (1987), wrote that he was unaware of his Jewish background until later in his youth: "I did not learn about the non-Christian part of my heritage until my early teens." His parents preferred to hide his Jewish heritage. His aunts, on his father's side, told him "the truth" when he was 14. He wrote that he "admired them unstintingly"; they in turn, treated him like a son.

Though his father, a prominent concert pianist, taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from high school. He took the surname of his maternal grandmother and became known as Melvyn Douglas.^{[citation needed]}

Douglas developed his acting skills in Shakespearean repertory while in his teens and with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa, Evansville, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin and Detroit, Michigan. He served in the United States Army in World War I. He established an outdoor theatre in Chicago. He had a long theatre, film and television career as a lead player, stretching from his 1930 Broadway role in Tonight or Never (opposite his future wife, Helen Gahagan) until just before his death. Douglas shared top billing with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton in James Whale's sardonic horror classic The Old Dark House in 1932.^{[citation needed]}

Douglas appeared as the hero in the 1932 horror film The Vampire Bat and the sophisticated leading man in She Married Her Boss (1935). He appeared with Joan Crawford in several films, most notably A Woman's Face (1941), and starred opposite Greta Garbo in three films: As You Desire Me (1932), Ninotchka (1939) and Garbo's final film Two-Faced Woman (1941). One of his most sympathetic roles was as the belatedly attentive father in Captains Courageous (1937).

During World War II, Douglas served first as a director of the Arts Council in the Office of Civilian Defense, and he then again served in the United States Army rising to the rank of major in the Special Services Entertainment Production Unit. According to his granddaughter Illeana Douglas, Melvyn Douglas first met Peter Sellers, his future Being There co-star while in Burma, when Sellers was serving in the Royal Air Force during the war. After the war, Douglas returned to films and more mature roles in The Sea of Grass (1947) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).