Melvyn Douglas

ACTOR, SOUNDTRACK

Melvyn Douglas Movies or Tv Shows (upto Dec 2024) - Watch Online

29th May 2022 | FlixCatalog Staff

Two-time Oscar-winner Melvyn Douglas was one of America's finest actors. In addition to his two Oscars, he also won a Tony Award and an Emmy. Douglas would enjoy cinema immortality if for no other reason than his being the man who made Greta Garbo laugh in Ernst Lubitsch's classic comedy Ninotchka (1939), but he was much, much more.Melvyn Douglas was born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg on April 5, 1901, in Macon, Georgia. His father, Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a noted concert pianist and composer, was a Latvian Jewish emigrant, from Riga. His mother, Lena Priscilla (Shackelford), from Clark Furnace, Tennessee, was from a family with deep roots in the United States, and the daughter of Col. George Taliaferro Shackelford. Melvyn's father supported his family by teaching music at university-based conservatories. Melvyn dropped out of high school to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.He made his Broadway debut in the drama "A Free Soul " at the Playhouse Theatre on January 12, 1928, playing the role of a raffish gangster (a part that would later make Clark Gable's career when the play was adapted to the screen as Ames libres (1931) ). "A Free Soul" was a modest success, running for 100 performances. His next three plays were flops: "Back Here" and "Now-a-Days" each lasted one week, while "Recapture" lasted all of three before closing. He was much luckier with his next play, "Tonight or Never," which opened on November 18, 1930, at legendary producer David Belasco's theater. Not only did the play run for 232 performances, but Douglas met the woman who would be his wife of nearly 50 years: his co-star, Helen Gahagan. They were married in 1931.The movies came a-calling in 1932 and Douglas had the unique pleasure of assaying completely different characters in widely divergent films. He first appeared opposite his future Ninotchka (1939) co-star Greta Garbo in the screen adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's Comme tu me veux (1932), proving himself a sophisticated leading man as, aside from his first-rate performance, he was able to shine in the light thrown off by Garbo, the cinema's greatest star. In typical Hollywood fashion, however, this terrific performance in a top-rank film from a major studio was balanced by his appearance in a low-budget horror film for the independent Mayfair studio, The Vampire Bat (1933). However, the leading man won out, and that's how he first came to fame in the 1930s in such films as Mon mari le patron (1935) and Garbo's final film, La femme aux deux visages (1941). Douglas had shown he could play both straight drama and light comedy.Douglas was a great liberal and was a pillar of the anti-Nazi Popular Front in the Hollywood of the 1930s. A big supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he and his wife Helen were invited to spend a night at the White House in November 1939. Douglas' leftism would come back to haunt him after the death of FDR.Well-connected with the Roosevelt White House, Douglas served as a director of the Arts Council in the Office of Civilian Defense before joining the Army during World War II. He was very active in politics and was one of the leading lights of the anti-Communist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Helen Gahagan Douglas, who also was politically active, was elected to Congress from the 14th District in Los Angeles in 1944, the first of three terms.Returning to films after the war, Douglas' screen persona evolved and he took on more mature roles, in such films as Le maître de la prairie (1947) (Elia Kazan's directorial debut) and Un million clefs en main (1948). His political past caught up with him, however, in the late 1940s, and he - along with fellow liberals Edward G. Robinson and Henry Fonda (a registered Republican!) - were "gray-listed" (not explicitly blacklisted, they just weren't offered any work).Then there was the theater. Douglas made many appearances on Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s, including in a notable 1959 flop, making his musical debut playing Captain Boyle in Marc Blitzstein's "Juno." The musical, based on Sean O'Casey's play "Juno and the Paycock", closed in less than three weeks. Douglas was much luckier in his next trip to the post: he won a Tony for his Broadway lead role in the 1960 play "The Best Man" by Gore Vidal.Douglas' evolution into a premier character actor was completed by the early 1960s. His years of movie exile seemed to deepen him, making him richer, and he returned to the big screen a more authoritative actor. For his second role after coming off of the graylist, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Paul Newman's father in Le plus sauvage d'entre tous (1963). Other films in which he shined were Paddy Chayefsky's Les jeux de l'amour et de la guerre (1964), CBS Playhouse (1967) (a 1967 episode directed by George Schaefer called "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", for which he won a Best Actor Emmy) and Votez Mc Kay (1972), in which he played Robert Redford's father. It was for his performance playing Gene Hackman's father that Douglas got his sole Best Actor Academy Award nod, in Je n'ai jamais chanté pour mon père (1970). He had a career renaissance in the late 1970s, appearing in La vie privée d'un sénateur (1979), Bienvenue Mister Chance (1979) and Le fantôme de Milburn (1981). He won his second Oscar for "Being There."Helen Gahagan Douglas died in 1980 and Melvyn followed her in 1981. He was 80 years old. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

Fan Zone

Streaming Availability

Amazon Video has the most number of Melvyn Douglas’s flixes, followed by YouTube compared to other streaming platforms. See the full graph below.

Releases by Year

Melvyn Douglas on average has worked on 1 movies per year from 1970 to 2000. See the full graphs of the number of Melvyn Douglas movies released per year from 1970 till 2000.

Top Genres

Melvyn Douglas works mostly in Drama Genre followed by Documentary Genre flixes. 47% of Melvyn Douglas movies are Drama Genre movies. See Top Genres that Melvyn Douglas worked on in the graph below.

Average IMDB Score

On average the IMDB score of the movies that Melvyn Douglas has worked on is 7.0.

7.0 / 10

Melvyn Douglas's Movies and Tv Series available to Stream now ..

Comedy,Drama
Being There (1979)

A simpleminded, sheltered gardener becomes an unlikely trusted advisor to a powerful businessman and an insider in Washington politics.

8/10130 min

Available in 10 platform(s).

Drama,Thriller
The Tenant (1976)

A bureaucrat rents a Paris apartment where he finds himself drawn into a rabbit hole of dangerous paranoia.

7.6/10126 min

Available in 6 platform(s).

A man who wants to move on with his life by moving to California and marry his girlfriend, finds it difficult as he still lives in the towering shadow of his aging father.

7.4/1092 min

Available in 11 platform(s).

Horror,Mystery
The Changeling (1980)

A man staying at a secluded historical mansion finds himself being haunted by the presence of a spectre.

7.2/10107 min

Available in 16 platform(s).

Bill McKay is a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California. He has no hope of winning, so he is willing to tweak the establishment.

7/10110 min

Available in 10 platform(s).

Touching story of elderly couple David and Eva who go on one last journey across the USA when they discover Eva is dying, ending up with their granddaughter Jeannie in San Francisco.

6.2/1090 min

Available in 5 platform(s).

A young woman has difficulty understanding why her husband walks out on her. Alone for the first time, she finds life difficult to cope with and for a time lives with the hope that her ...

6.1/1097 min

Available in 5 platform(s).