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The Douglas

Foundation Archive

Goes Fully Digital for

Public Access

he Actor Michael Douglas has more on his mind than just
acting these days as the Trustee of the Douglas Foundation,
Tthe charitable entity that had allocated more than $118
million in grants before Kirk Douglas’ death three years ago at age
103 and his wife Anne’s death a year later at 102 (they were married
for 66 years). Since then, the Foundation has disbursed several
million dollars.
Now the Douglas Foundation, which was created by Kirk and Anne
in 1964 when Michael was just 20, has just launched for the first time
a high resolution on-line library of documents, photos, and memorabilia
digitized from Anne’s private archives of more than seventy years. Some
10,000 items in all from the couple who,
among other enterprises, used their celebrity
to spread American good will as State
Department ambassadors in self-financed
travels to more than 40 countries. Aside
from Kirk’s 80-plus films, and 12 books,
he and Anne were known widely for their
charitable and humanitarian works.
“After they passed,” Michael tells
Deadline about this discovery of his
father’s and stepmother’s life and
works, “we faced the heartbreaking
task of sifting through Anne’s many
hiding places in Beverly Hills and
Montecito as well as several commercial
storage areas. She saved everything!
There was a hint of the quantity and
quality in their 2017 book called
Kirk And Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter
and a Lifetime in Hollywood, but there
was so much more.”
“Not being a child of the digital age, I
presumed it would take years to reproduce
everything, would be prohibitively expen-
sive, and have limited accessibility. And then
a friend told me about a remarkable Israeli
photographer named Ardon Bar-Hama who
developed a technique and a camera that
allowed him to capture stunning high-res
images of the most fragile of artifacts,” he
said. “One of his first commissions was
digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The
Vatican trusted him with its most precious
acquisition, a Christian Bible dating to
350 A.D. Ardon has photographed the
documents in Albert Einstein and Nelson
Mandela’s archives, and 80,000 historic
items from Carnegie Hall, amongst his
many digitized projects. So I thought he
could be trusted with Anne’s modest
treasure trove! I couldn’t believe that he works alone
and quickly, bringing only one suitcase with him. Inside is the cam-
era he designed valued at $50,000 that produces the highest
resolution–up to 1,200 megapixels.”
To view the collection, visit https://douglasfoundation.org/archive/

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