Movie star Kirk Douglas, perhaps one of the last noticeable remnants of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the man who helped bring to life such timeless classics like “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory,” died Wednesday at the age of 103. He leaves behind an unparalleled legacy.
In a statement posted to his Instagram, actor Michael Douglas, Kirk’s son, announced with “tremendous sadness” that his father had passed away, extolling his father’s work on and off the silver screen.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” wrote Michael Douglass. “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 for all of us to aspire to.”
“But to me and my brothers Joel and Peter he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great-grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife Anne, a wonderful husband,” continued Michael. “Kirk’s life was well-lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come, and a history as a renowned philanthropist who worked to aid the public and bring peace to the planet.”
“Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad — I love you so much and I am so proud to be your son,” he concluded.
Douglas suffered a stroke in 1996 shortly before receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar for his multi-generational work in film. The Hollywood Reporter provided a brief snapshot of his most remembered roles:
Nominated three times for best actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — for Champion (1949), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Lust for Life (1956) — Douglas was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1996. Arguably the top male star of the post-World War II era, he acted in more than 80 movies before retiring from films in 2004.
The father of two-time Oscar-winning actor-director-producer Michael Douglas, the Amsterdam, New York native first achieved stardom as a ruthless and cynical boxer in Champion. In The Bad and the Beautiful, he played a hated, ambitious movie producer for director Vincente Minnelli, then was particularly memorable, again for Minnelli, as the tormented genius Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award for best actor.
Of course, Douglas will forever be known for his role in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), which became one of Universal’s highest-grossing pictures. Written by Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, the film was largely seen as a defiant gesture to the McCarthy Era. It was the second movie directed by Kubrick in which Douglas, acted following 1957’s “Paths of Glory.”
“I’ve always been a maverick,” Douglas once said of his career. “When I was new in pictures, I defied my agents to make Champion rather than appear in an important MGM movie they had planned for me [The Great Sinner, which wound up starring Gregory Peck]. Nobody had ever heard of the people connected to Champion, but I liked the Ring Lardner story, and that’s the movie I wanted to do. Everyone thought I was crazy, of course, but I think I made the right decision.”