The Oscar-winning missed opportunity Kirk Douglas called his “biggest disappointment”
It can’t have been easy for Kirk Douglas to sit on the sidelines and watch a character he’d gone out of his way to bring to the screen not only be played by somebody else but win them an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
Not only that, but his son ended up winning an Oscar as its producer when the film in question took home the ‘Best Picture’ prize. The golden statue would add insult to injury and give rise to a simmering tension between the two that would take decades to fully heal.
In fact, when Kirk and Michael Douglas were the subjects of the documentary A Father, A Son: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which dived into their careers and personal relationship, the former openly referred to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as “the picture where you destroyed me”. In response, the latter acknowledges how it’s “so nice to know he forgives and forgets”, but the bad blood was very real.
The elder Douglas acquired the rights to Ken Kesey’s source novel in 1962 to mount both stage and screen productions of the story, with Jack Nicholson being one of the many interested parties who was ultimately outbid. Of course, things worked out well for the actor in the long run, but it took a while to get there.
Douglas did play the part of Randall McMurphy on Broadway, but he couldn’t find a studio willing to take the source material to the silver screen. It was he who contacted Miloš Forman as a potential director, too, before protracted legal battles over the rights saw the second-generation Douglas step in as producer in 1971.
By the time One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest started gaining real traction, the powers-that-be deemed Kirk too old to play the lead role. Although Michael maintained he wasn’t part of that decision-making process, it caused their bond to become strained after one of them remained on board right through to Oscars success while the other was cast out.
Instead, Nicholson – 21 years Kirk Douglas’ junior – was drafted in to lead the line and ended up giving one of the best performances of not only his own illustrious career but in the history of mainstream American cinema. It finally won him that elusive Oscar at the fifth time of asking, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest winning five statues in total, all while Douglas was left to simmer with resentment.
Although he referred to missing out on McMurphy as the “biggest disappointment” of his professional life, he was at least smart enough to realise there were no guarantees he would have been able to deliver a performance of similar acclaim. “If Jack was lousy in it, I would have said, ‘What a mistake they made,'” he reflected. “But he got an Oscar, so maybe I would have been wrong in the part.”
