Beginnings and endings should always dovetail in any well-constructed drama. And there was a touch of theatrical symmetry involved as family and friends gathered in Bermuda last week to pay their final respects to Diana Douglas.

Held on the very eve of the Island’s brush with Hurricane Joaquin, the Bermudian actress, who died in July at the age of 92, had grown up enthralled by the power of these monstrous storms to not just reshape nature but, somewhat incongruously, to strengthen family bonds.

“I loved the hurricanes,” she said of her childhood in 1920s Bermuda. “The preparations as the waves grew higher and the sky grew darker, the outdoor furniture brought in, the last phone calls before the line went dead, the candles and hurricane lamps came out.

“Mother sang softly as she massaged our scalps and we sipped cocoa. Father and the boys made occasional forays to check on the storm shutters while the wind shrieked outside.

“It was a time when the family was closest together.”

Known throughout the world as the former wife of one superstar, the mother of another and the mother-in-law of a third, Diana Douglas modestly titled her bestselling 1999 memoir In The Wings — theatrical idiom for the area where actors wait offstage, out of sight of the audience, until called on to enter a scene.

It’s true she never became a household name like one-time spouse Kirk Douglas, son Michael Douglas and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But she was an accomplished and well-regarded professional in her own right, with a career spanning more than 70 years.

Diana Douglas’s credits ranged from co-starring roles alongside the likes of everyone from Golden Age Hollywood screen legend Edward G. Robinson to Steve Martin to a triumphant and critically lauded 1993 Broadway turn. Her long career was based on talent rather than nepotism, unflagging industry and application rather than celebrity.

And throughout her time in the public eye, Diana Douglas was also, of course, a dignified, consistent and indefatigable champion for Bermuda.

Singing the Island’s praises at every available opportunity, during her marriage to Kirk Douglas — when she was considered Hollywood royalty and interviewed and profiled incessantly — a journalist once described her as “the unofficial West Coast spokesman for the Bermuda tourism industry.

“And, frankly, she’s probably a more effective, appealing and compelling one than the official East Coast marketers for the holiday resort ...”.

Returning home often, she introduced sons Michael and Joel to Bermuda and their Bermudian family as infants (“I remember summers in Bermuda as a child and the feeling of peacefulness that the natural environment of the Island provides — the island air and the beautiful light; the pink beaches; the crystal clear blue-green water; the tropical flora,” said two-times Oscar winner Michael Douglas, who later lived on the Island full-time for a decade with wife Catherine Zeta-Jones and their young children. “There is also a special feeling of connectedness that comes with being on the island that was my mother’s childhood home and our family’s home for the past 400 years.”)

Born and raised on North Shore, Devonshire, Diana Douglas’s father had commanded the Bermuda Militia Artillery on the Western Front in the First World War and later served as a Member of Colonial Parliament and the Island’s Attorney-General.

High-born and extremely privileged by the standards of her day, Diana Douglas was nevertheless famously — and ferociously — intolerant of intolerance in all of its racial, political and religious forms.

Intelligent, inquisitive and independent, she grew up in a caste-ridden Bermuda where elitism was entrenched and social and professional exclusion was a painful everyday reality for too many of her neighbours and childhood playmates.

Partly as a reaction to these conditions, she was, from an early age, aware that self-reinforcing dogma simply breeds unthinking dogmatism.

And, from an equally early age, she politely, but firmly, grew impatient with pomposity, hypocrisy and bigotry masquerading as genteel cultural norms.

She wrote in her memoirs of how she came to “rethink the prejudices of my childhood and the paternalistic attitudes of the white families [in Bermuda].

“We didn’t think of ourselves as racist, but we were not as altruistic as we thought we were.

“ ... We were pretty smug, actually”.

Later, after marrying two Jewish-American men, she was to encounter both the discreet but pervasive anti-Semitism that then riddled US society, along with the devastating threat of blacklisting, which tended to be applied disproportionately against Jews in the entertainment industry.

Employed against those in the Hollywood community, whose liberal political views could be deliberately misrepresented as Communist or Communist-leaning by publicity-hungry Cold War-era Washington demagogues and their cronies in the popular press, the ’50s-era Blacklist ruined countless careers, reputations and lives. But it only reinforced Ms Douglas’s sense of justice and fair play.

She was rarely known to hold her tongue in the face of ignorance, bullying and casual smears.

Born Diana Love Dill in Bermuda in 1923, Ms Douglas studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she met another aspiring young actor, Kirk Douglas, whom she married in 1943.

She began her career with Warner Brothers and modelled for the cover of Life magazine in 1943 before going on to appear in dozens of films and TV shows, including Planes, Trains and Automobiles, ER and The West Wing. Diana and Kirk Douglas divorced in 1951, but eventually forged a friendly rapprochement for the sake of their children, and appeared together in It Runs in the Family, a 2003 film about a dysfunctional family, alongside son Michael.

After divorcing Kirk Douglas, she married the writer and producer Bill Darrid, who died in 1992 and whose ashes are interred at Old Devonshire Church.

She married, thirdly, in a 2002 Bermuda ceremony, Donald Webster, a US Treasury chief of staff under President Richard Nixon, whom she met at a party in Washington in 1999 to mark the launch of her memoirs. He survives her along with her two sons from her first marriage. Given her views on the renewal, which always follows in the aftermath of a hurricane (“The curious look of everything after the storm ... New vistas on the hill where the trees had been toppled. The oleanders smelling like ice cream tastes, and dew shining on the cedar berries ...”) and that these storms invariably bring families together, Ms Douglas would likely have approved that her own memorial service was held in Joaquin’s shadow.

Death held no fear for Diana Douglas. And the site of her final resting place tended to inspire in her thoughts of continuity rather than of mortality (Devonshire churchyard “is a peaceful and beautiful site, one that invites contemplation ... I am glad my ashes will be there. It seems fitting; it seems right.”)

Her only advice to her family on how to live and behave was encapsulated in a short and fairly simple credo: “Be courageous, be compassionate and, for God’s sake, have fun!”

We could all do worse than to follow this dictum.

TIM HODGSON