Two Memories of the Late Kirk Douglas

In the 1990s, while traveling out regularly to Los Angeles, I would often meet with and study Torah and other Jewish texts with Kirk Douglas.

He once said to me, “Before I die, I want to be in a movie in which I put on tefillin” (the phylacteries that Jewish men are enjoined to wear on their head and an arm while reciting their morning prayers).

My agent, Ross Fineman, called up the producers at “Touched by an Angel” and told them the good news that he could get them Kirk Douglas, but he wanted a rabbi friend with whom he had studied to write the script. My friend and co-screenplay writer Allen Estrin and I wrote the episode, in which indeed Mr. Douglas put on tefillin — we made it integral to the plot. Mr. Douglas was nominated for an Emmy for this episode, “Bar Mitzvah.”

Years later, Mr. Douglas attended  a Passover Seder at our house at which our then-young children and their cousins put on a Passover skit.

My wife turned to me and said, “How could we put on a play here, and Kirk not be in it?”

Mr. Douglas immediately chose the role of Pharaoh and with his trademark ability to get inside the mind of even evil figures and show how they justified themselves to themselves, he sat up in his armchair and ad-libbed in a bellowing voice: “You think I am evil! You all have me pegged and labeled as your villain. But do any of you know the truth? It was I, Pharaoh, who raised your greatest prophet, Moses. It was I who allowed him to be brought up in the palace! Of course I knew he was a Hebrew baby. Yet I thought this one I will spare. Did you mention once in your Seder that I saved your greatest hero?”

Later, he wrote us a letter thanking us for the Seder — he apologized if his performance was in any way disrespectful — and with his puckish humor he signed the letter “Pharaoh.”

Kirk Douglas was much more than a great and noble actor, he was a great and noble human being, with a very very warm Jewish heart. I miss him deeply.