2. Kirk Douglas

Silver screen icon Kirk Douglas is a legend in the entertainment industry, but he certainly seemed to overestimate his size back in the day. Douglas’ listed height in his heyday was 5’11”, but considering how short the centenarian looks now it seems very unlikely that he was ever close to six feet tall. More reasonable estimates put young Kirk at around 5’8″ or 5’9″, since the elderly star seems to be around 5’6″ or 5’7″ now and it seems unlikely that he would have lost more than an inch or two of height over the years. And behind the scenes stories told through the grapevine pretty much confirm that Douglas enjoyed the assistance of elevator shoes. Supposedly when filming a movie with the 6’2″ star Burt Lancaster, Burt swiped Kirk’s elevator shoes as a joke, and the crew had to improvise a solution to make the much shorter Douglas look like a more even match to Lancaster, so they had Douglas stand on top of a box for the scenes instead.

1. John Wayne

Legendary Western star John Wayne was not a man who was in need of any extra height. His reported height is 6’4″ and he was a memorably imposing figure in all of his films, but quite a few of his co-stars claim that the actor wore lifts to make his already above average size even more imposing on screen. Wayne’s female co-stars actually had to stand on apple boxes quite often just to be able to appear in the same frame as their leading man, but some pretty well known actors like Rock Hudson and Robert Mitchum both stated that they had personally seen the lifts that Wayne liked to wear. Mitchum even elaborated that Wayne had to have a lot of his personal property like clothes and shoes specially made to fit the extra size that his lifts gave him, and once joked that “they probably buried him in his goddamn lifts.”

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