Melvyn Douglas Movies and Career Information

Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg (April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981), better known as Melvyn Douglas, was an American actor. Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia to Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford), a Protestant Tennessee-born Mayflower descendant and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a Jewish concert pianist and composer from Riga, Latvia, then part of Russia. Though his father taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from high school. Douglas, in his autobiography, See You at the Movies (1987), writes that he was unaware of his Jewish background until later in his youth: "I did not learn about the non-Christian part of my heritage until my early teens," as his parents preferred to hide his Jewish heritage. It was his aunts, on his father's side, who told him "the truth" when he was 14. He writes that he "admired them unstintingly and modeled" himself on them; they in turn treated him like a son. He took the surname of his maternal grandmother, and was more commonly known as Melvyn Douglas. Douglas developed his acting skills in Shakespearean repertory while in his teens and with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa; Evansville, Indiana; Madison,