The Douglas Foundation archive adds 10,000 of Anne and Kirk’s personal items and is fully digitized online for public access

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Douglas has more on his mind than the upcoming worldwide release of his latest foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania which opens February 17 and has its world premiere Monday night in Westwood. Or even his upcoming eight-episode Apple TV+ series Franklin based on the life of founder Benjamin Franklin, in which he plays the title role.

The actor is also currently involved as a trustee of the Douglas Foundation, the charity that provided more than $118 million in grants before the death of Kirk Douglas three years ago at the age of 103 and the death of his wife Anne a years later at the age of 102 (they were married 66 years). Michael says the foundation has paid out several million dollars since then.

Now, for the first time, the Douglas Foundation, founded by Kirk and Anne in 1964 when Michael was just 20, has just launched a high-resolution online library of documents, photographs and memorabilia, digitized from Anne’s private archives spanning over 70 years. became . A total of about 10,000 articles by the couple, who, among other things, used their fame to spread American goodwill as State Department ambassadors on self-funded trips to more than 40 countries. Apart from Kirk’s more than 80 films and 12 books, he and Anne were known for their charity and humanitarian work.

“After they died,” Michael tells Deadline of this discovery of the life and work of his father and stepmother, “we were faced with the heartbreaking task of searching Anne’s many hiding places in Beverly Hills and Montecito and various trading depots. She saved everything! There was a hint of quantity and quality in her 2017 book titled Kirk And Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter and a Lifetime in Hollywood, but there was so much more.”

Little did Michael know that this new venture he was pursuing on behalf of the Douglas Foundation would take him to areas he had never experienced in his life or career.

“Not being a child of the digital age, I assumed it would take years to reproduce, be prohibitively expensive and have limited access. 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 beautiful, high-resolution images of the most fragile artifacts, ” he said. “One of his first assignments was to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Vatican entrusted him with its most precious possession, a Christian Bible from 350 AD. In addition to his many digitization projects, Ardon has photographed the records in the archives of Albert Einstein and Nelson Mandela, as well as 80,000 historical objects from Carnegie Hall. So I thought he could trust Anne’s humble treasure chest! I couldn’t believe that he was working alone and fast and carrying only one suitcase. Inside is the $50,000 camera he designed, which delivers the highest resolution – up to 1,200 megapixels.

Michael says anyone with an internet connection can access the site at https://douglasfoundation.org/archive/. It just went live. I just checked out a few of these and it is indeed a remarkable collection made from scratch thanks to modern technology.