He was known in the French press as Le Brute Cheri, or ‘the darling brute’ for his prowess at winning women, but in 1953, at the same time Kirk Douglas was promoting Act of Love, he was falling in love with his translator.
The legendary actor has now been married to that translator, then called Anne Buydens, for 63 years. To celebrate the milestone, the couple have just released a joint memoir called Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood, that reveals how the famous lothario wooed his French fancy with words, then kept wooing her with them throughout their marriage.
Douglas, who turned 100 in December, says that Anne kept all their love letters, but he came up with the idea of publishing them because he felt modern society had lost the art of writing romantic billets doux,
“I hope our grandchildren won’t be shocked by the intensity of the letters,” he says. “Perhaps they will come to value, even in this world of instant communication, the joy of writing and receiving non-electronic letters — particularly when it comes to love.”
“Today, you get an email. It does nothing to you! It’s cold. It’s the new world. I like the old world better,” Anne adds.
And the letters certainly are saucy, with Anne, now 98, writing in one that she often imagined her husband “taking me in your arms — let’s say in a horizontal position”.
In return, Douglas told her how much he’d be “a bum and a drunkard” without her.
“And the awful thing is I keep needing you more and more as I get older,” he wrote,.
Anne, who was born in Germany before moving to France to flee the Nazis, also reveals that she was aware of Douglas’ many extra-marital dalliances, including with Rita Hayworth, Patricia Neal and Faye Dunaway (he tried and failed to seduce Lauren Bacall).
“Kirk never tried to hide his dalliances from me,” the 98-year-old wrote. “As a European, I understood it was unrealistic to expect total fidelity in a marriage.”
Anne famously saved Douglas from the private plane crashed that Elizabeth Taylor’s then-husband Mike Todd in 1958, by refusing to let him on the flight as he intended after a “strange feeling” came over her. The couple went on to have two children together, Peter and the late Eric – Douglas had sons Michael, also an actor, and Joel from his first marriage to Diana Dill.
In one of the published letters, Douglas was very prescient, given that the couple remain happily married today – they were pictured holding hands and laughing together at the 25th anniversary of The Anne Douglas Centre just a few days ago (below).
“I know that when you get here, we will not have time to say all the things we want to say to each other,” he wrote to Anne before she returned from an overseas trip, almost 60 years ago. “In fact, if we live to be 100, there will still be so many unsaid things — which is just as well, perhaps, because then, if there is a life after death, we will have many things to talk about later.”