Screen legend Kirk Douglas, one of the last remaining stars of the Hollywood studio era, died Wednesday, the actor’s family stated.
The star of films such as “Champion,” “Spartacus” and “Lust for Life,” and the father of fellow actor Michael Douglas was 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103. To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard of us all to aspire to,” Michael Douglas said in a statement.
The elder Mr. Douglas had been in poor health since a 1996 stroke, but the dimple-chinned actor had reportedly regained much of his faculties in recent years.
Born Issur Danielovitch to a family of Russian Jews who spoke Yiddish at home, Mr. Douglas shot to fame in the late-1940s and made more than 80 films over his career.
He first caught eyes with supporting roles in the woman’s picture “Letter to Three Wives” and the film-noir classic “Out of the Past” opposite Robert Mitchum.
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But it was his Oscar-nominated turn as an anti-hero boxer in “Champion” that made him one of the industry’s top leading man throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The World War II Navy veteran was one of the first stars of his stature willing to play heels or creeps in leading roles.
His fighter in “Champion” double-crosses his manager, dumps then sexually assaults his wife, and abandons his ailing mother. His journalist in Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” lets a man stay trapped in a cave rather than rescue him, for the sake of the news story.
He was nominated for two other Best Actor Oscars in the 1950s — as an unscrupulous producer in the behind-the-scenes film-making movie “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as painter Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.”
Mr. Douglas received an honorary Oscar in 1996 for his career and accepted it not long after the stroke.
“They are proud of the old man,” he told the Los Angeles audience that night, adding in a halting speech that he was “proud to be part of Hollywood for 50 years.”
He also received a similar lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Carter.
In the 1950s, he also began producing films, sometimes using his status as a star to highlight unknown talent and get difficult projects made.
He starred in and produced two of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films — “Paths of Glory” in 1957 and “Spartacus” in 1960, putting Kubrick on the path to becoming a directorial legend, though the two men sometimes clashed.
But the film about an enslaved man who led a rebellion against Rome became a classic best known for the oft-repeated line “I am Spartacus” from its climax.
“Spartacus” also was instrumental in breaking the Hollywood blacklist, as Mr. Douglas insisted on giving screen credit to writer Dalton Trumbo who, like many a barred leftist scribe, had been working in Europe and/or under pseudonyms for much of the 1950s.
“Everybody advised me not to do it because you won’t be able to work in this town again and all of that. But I was young enough to say ’to hell with it,’” Mr. Douglas said in a 2011 interview with The Associated Press. “I think if I was much older, I would have been too conservative: ’Why should I stick my neck out?’”
His production company also made “Seven Days In May,” a story about a military coup in the U.S., in which Mr. Douglas also co-starred opposite Burt Lancaster, one of seven movies the pair of old-school tough-guy actors made together, stretching into the 1980s.
Both men were known for their intense physical presence and demanding behavior on set. Though their working relationship remained good, it wasn’t always good during shooting.
“Kirk would be the first to tell you that he is a very difficult man. And I would be the second,” Lancaster once said.
Mr. Douglas is survived by his wife of 65 years, the former Anne Buydens; sons Michael, Joel and Peter; and seven grandchildren.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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