‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’: A role Kirk Douglas always regretted turning down
You’d think it would be difficult to live to the ripe old age of 103 years old without amassing at least a few career regrets, but relative to how long he was in the industry, Kirk Douglas didn’t have too many.
He made his screen debut in 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and bowed out with a supporting role in the 2008 made-for-television mockumentary Empire State Building Murders, so he’d been around the block and back a few times, but not enough to have him wistfully looking back and thinking about what might have been had the cards been dealt even a little differently.
Of course, the exception to that rule is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with Douglas so broken-hearted that he was deemed too old to play Randall P McMurphy in the big-screen adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, a role that he’d originated on Broadway after acquiring the rights specifically to bring the story to both stage and screen, that it caused a schism in his relationship with his son, Michael.
The actor and producer must have been experiencing an agonising case of mixed emotions when his boy claimed an Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ for producing a film that he’d always wanted to headline himself, but apart from that, the veteran wasn’t one for ruing the pictures or parts that got away.
In fact, even though he turned down William Holden’s Oscar-winning gig in Stalag 17, Lee Marvin’s Oscar-winning gig in Cat Ballou, and Charlton Heston’s Oscar-winning gig in Ben-Hur, and never won the big one himself despite three nominations, he didn’t bitch, moan, or complain about missing out.
However, there is one thing that can make anyone who works in Hollywood lament their decision-making, and you can probably guess what it is. He was offered the lead in Anthony Mann’s 1964 historical epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire, but his aversion to another post-Spartacus period piece convinced him to knock it back.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, maybe he shouldn’t have, since he left a lot of money on the table. “I was stupid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1971. “Because with $1.5 million, there are lots of things you can do that you want to.” In an ironic role reversal, Heston had turned down the part of Livius before it was ultimately played by Stephen Boyd, but it was only the cash that made Douglas bristle.
For a good reason, too; since he was one of the first top-level stars to start producing their own projects, he wasn’t averse to a high-paying studio gig, since it provided the financial security for him to fund a passion project or two, with that ‘one for them, one for me’ mentality defining his peak years.
In his defence, The Fall of the Roman Empire completely and utterly tanked at the box office and lost a fortune for Paramount as one of the studio’s biggest-ever money losers, but you get the sneaking suspicion that $1.5 million would have softened that particular blow.
