Corral, Paths Of Glory, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.ĭouglas was a committed activist and showed his humanitarian side when he demanded the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo receive a credit for the 1960 adventure Spartacus. He earned Oscar nominations for Champion (1949), The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) and Lust For Life (1956), and received an honourary Oscar in 1996.ĭouglas retired in 2004 at the end of a career in which his highlights included Seven Days In May, Lonely Are The Brave, Gunfight At The O.K. Later that year he starred opposite Barbara Stanwyck on screen in The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers.Īfter that his Hollywood career flourished. He graduated in 1941 and made his Broadway debut that year, before enlisting in the Navy and serving in the Pacific before an honourable discharge in 1944.ĭouglas returned to the stage and caught Hollywood’s eye in 1946 when he appeared in The Wind Is Ninety. I will miss his handwritten notes, letters and fatherly advice, and his wisdom and courage – even beyond such a breathtaking body of work – are enough to inspire me for the rest of mine.”īorn Issur Danielovitch Demsky in Amsterdam, New York, in 1916 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Douglas worked manual jobs to put himself through Lawrence University and won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

In a statement, Steven Spielberg said, ”Kirk retained his movie star charisma right to the end of his wonderful life and I’m honored to have been a small part of his last 45 years. He was 103.Īnnouncing the death on Instagram, son Michael Douglas paid tribute to “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.” Kirk Douglas, the feisty and beloved star of Spartacus and Lust For Life and committed humanitarian activist, has died.

Spartacus death