Hollywood legend and Spartacus star Kirk Douglas dead at 103
US leading man, producer and director is the father of Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker, Michael Douglas.
Kirk Douglas, one of the last surviving movie stars from Hollywood’s golden age, whose rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence in celebrated films like “Lust for Life,” “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 103.
His son the actor Michael Douglas announced the death in a statement on his Facebook page.
Mr. Douglas had made a long and difficult recovery from the effects of a severe stroke he suffered in 1996. In 2011, cane in hand, he came onstage at the Academy Awards ceremony, good-naturedly flirted with the co-host Anne Hathaway and jokingly stretched out his presentation of the Oscar for best supporting actress.
By then, and even more so as he approached 100 and largely dropped out of sight, he was one of the last flickering stars in a Hollywood firmament that few in Hollywood’s Kodak Theater on that Oscars evening could have known except through viewings of old movies now called classics. A vast number filling the hall had not even been born when he was at his screen-star peak, the 1950s and ’60s.
The US leading man, producer and director came to prominence in the late 1940s and never lost his popularity, taking on nearly 100 movies during a 60-year career.
His death at his family home in Beverly Hills was confirmed by his son Michael Douglas, the Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker.
Larger than life
Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch to Jewish-Russian immigrants in upstate New York in 1916, began working as a stage actor before joining the United States Navy during the second world war.
He graduated to movies in 1946 when Casablanca producer Hal Wallis signed him, and he became a star for his role as a double-crossing and womanising boxer in 1949’s Champion.
His subsequent roles would often mirror his real-world, larger-than-life and intense persona, including a ruthless movie producer in The Bad and the Beautiful”(1952) and tortured artist Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956).
Douglas told The New York Times in a 1984 interview that he had “always been attracted to characters who are part scoundrel”, adding: “I don’t find virtue photogenic.”
He was renowned for his physical commitment to roles, training for months to play a boxer in Champion, and learning to ride a horse and shoot in the 1957 Western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Douglas was nominated three times for an Oscar – his last nomination was for Lust for Life – but missed out each time and was never nominated again.
He was granted an honorary lifetime achievement statuette by the Academy in 1996 – just months after a severe stroke – “for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.”
Douglas is survived by his second wife Anne Buydens, 100, and three sons. A fourth child, Eric, died of a drug overdose in his 40s, in 2004.
“(To) me and my brothers Joel and Peter he was simply Dad, to Catherine (Zeta-Jones), a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife Anne, a wonderful husband,” Michael said.
