The Movie Hero’s Toughest Fight: How Kirk Douglas Beat a Near-Fatal Stroke

October 29 is World Stroke Day, to help us all recognize the causes and effects of stroke.

In 1996 a severe stroke nearly killed one of America’s greatest actors, the then-79-year-old Kirk Douglas.

Overnight this dynamic, seemingly ageless, icon of film was plunged into a terrifying new reality that he later admitted had him considering suicide.

But it turned out that Douglas, in real life, was every bit as tough and relentless as the heroic characters he played on screen.

Get your copy of Kirk Douglas’s book

And then Douglas did something even more heroic – he not only went public with his fight to regain health, he wrote a book about it. In typically defiant Kirk Douglas fashion, he called it My Stroke of Luck. It was published in 2002, six years after his life-changing episode.

It may be hard to listen to this interview, but you will draw incredible inspiration from it.

So here now, from 2002, Kirk Douglas.

Kirk Douglas died in 2019. He was 103.

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