Kirk Douglas, one of the great Hollywood leading men whose off-screen life was nearly as colorful as his on-screen exploits, has died, according to his son, actor Michael Douglas. He was 103.
"It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103," he wrote on his verified Instagram account. "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."
Michael Douglas added that his father'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."
He added: "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."
Douglas was far more than just a leading man, although he was certainly that. The actor was a larger-than-life character, a titan of the entertainment industry, and someone -- by virtue of his longevity-- one of the last surviving links to a particular era of Hollywood's past.
Born to Russian immigrant parents, the self-made star established himself as an actor following World War II, capitalizing on his looks and athleticism. In that regard, he had a good deal in common with another titan of those years, Burt Lancaster, with whom Douglas co-starred in seven movies, including "Gunfight at O.K. Corral" and the political thriller "Seven Days in May."
Still, Douglas exhibited a range that went beyond what was available to stars during an earlier stretch of the studio system. And like Lancaster, he seized control of his career in the mid-1950s by forming his own production company, using that leverage not only to find interesting parts for himself but to champion prestige material, as well as talent like director Stanley Kubrick, with who he collaborated on two memorable films, "Paths of Glory" and "Spartacus."
Perhaps foremost, Douglas was as comfortable -- and as good, if not better -- playing a bad guy, a heel, as he was a traditional hero. His steely edge shone through starting with the film noir classic "Out of the Past" in 1947, followed by "Champion," "The Bad and the Beautiful" and "The Vikings."
Douglas was equally comfortable with action and serious drama, combining a nasty streak with a wry sense of humor. He excelled at playing terrible characters who nonetheless left the audience feeling a measure of sadness, in spite of themselves, when they met an untimely end.
The actor earning Oscar nominations for playing Vincent Van Gogh in "Lust for Life," "Champion" and "Bad and the Beautiful," but never won. He did receive a lifetime achievement award in 1996, and crooned a memorable duet with Lancaster at the 1958 Academy Awards, insisting how happy they were not to be among the nominees.
Douglas famously used his clout in other ways, perhaps most famously by allowing blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to put his name on "Spartacus." Although there has been some dispute over just how significant that was in "breaking" the blacklist, as Douglas suggested in his autobiography, it did make clear his commitment to working with top talent, also employing Trumbo on one of his best films, "Lonely Are the Brave," which cast Douglas as a modern-day cowboy.
Douglas also remained a colorful and outspoken figure, even after a 1996 stroke impaired his speech -- mounting a one-man show in its aftermath. His aforementioned 1988 autobiography, "The Ragman's Son," was a classic Hollywood tell-all, detailing various affairs with well-known actresses and settling some old scores. As the New York Times described it, the book read "like a collection of stories the actor has been telling over dinner for years."
In perhaps the most famous -- and certainly most lampooned -- scene from "Spartacus," his fellow rebels, captured by the Roman army, rise to proclaim, "I'm Spartacus!" when told their lives will be spared if they identify him.
Many actors, before and since, have played the sort of roles at which Douglas excelled. But in terms of breadth, volume and variety, there was only one Kirk Douglas.
Kirk Douglas dead at 103; ‘Spartacus’ star helped end Hollywood blacklist
Kirk Douglas, right, and John Wayne in 1966's "Cast a Giant Shadow." ((Photofest))
Never a fan of the Hollywood studio system, Douglas rose up as a maverick filmmaker
Kirk Douglas, the dimple-chinned screen icon who was known for bringing an explosive, clenched-jawed intensity to a memorable array of heroes and heels in films such as “Spartacus” and “Champion” and for playing an off-screen role as a maverick independent producer who helped end the Hollywood blacklist, has died. He was 103.
Douglas, who continued to act occasionally after overcoming a stroke in 1996 that impaired his speech, died Wednesday, People magazine reported.
The stage-trained Douglas earned the first Oscar nomination of his long acting career playing one of the post-World War II era's anti-heroes: the ruthlessly ambitious boxer in the 1949 drama “Champion.”
Douglas later received Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as the tormented artist Vincent Van Gogh in the 1956 biographical drama “Lust for Life.”
“I have never felt any need to project a certain image as an actor,” Douglas wrote in “The Ragman’s Son,” his bestselling 1988 autobiography. “I like a role that is stimulating, challenging, interesting to play. That's why I'm often attracted to characters that aren't likable.”
Never a fan of the Hollywood studio system — he likened the standard seven-year studio contract to slavery — Douglas launched his own independent production company in 1955.
Named after Douglas' immigrant mother, the Bryna Co. produced a number of films in which Douglas starred, including director Stanley Kubrick's landmark anti-war film, “Paths of Glory,” “The Vikings” and “Spartacus.” Douglas' Joel Productions, named after one of his sons, also produced “Seven Days in May” and “Lonely Are the Brave.”
As executive producer of “Spartacus,” Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name for his work on the 1960 Roman-Empire epic that starred Douglas as the gladiator-trained slave-revolt leader.
In acknowledgment of a career that spanned more than 60 years and more than 80 films, Douglas was honored late in life with numerous major awards: The American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and an honorary Oscar for his “50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.”
“He's one of the legendary figures of his era,” said film historian Jeanine Basinger, chair of the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University, who first saw Douglas on screen as a young movie-goer in the late 1940s.
“I immediately focused on him because he was different,” Basinger told The Times. “He wasn't a traditional leading man, really, in looks, and yet he had an unmistakable charisma and power on screen — not just the glamour of the movie star, though he did have that, but real acting chops. So you knew he was going to be a star.”
Douglas, she said, “embodied the anti-hero in movies” in films such as “Champion” and “Ace in the Hole,” in which he played an unscrupulous newspaper reporter who cynically exploits a tragedy to boost his career.
“He was a very modern American anti-hero type, but he could also play anything, really,” said Basinger.
Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote in 2016 that on camera, Douglas had the remarkable gift for “for being at the same time defiantly himself and convincingly other people.”
The only son of seven children of illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on Dec. 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, N.Y. (The family later changed its name to Demsky, and young Issur was renamed Isadore — a name he said he always hated and which prompted a nickname that he hated even more, Izzy.)
As a child, Douglas developed an early sense of the direction his life might take.
“I have always wanted to be an actor, I believe from the first time I recited a poem in kindergarten about the Red Robin of Spring. They applauded. I liked that sound. I still do,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Unable to afford college after graduating from high school in 1934, he worked in a department store for a year and played John Barrymore in a little theater production of “The Royal Family.”
Thanks to a college loan, he was accepted at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., where he earned a varsity letter for wrestling and was elected president of the student body. To help support himself, he worked as a janitor during the school year. Summers he found other work, including operating a cutting machine in a steel mill and wrestling in carnivals.
After graduating in 1939, young Isadore Demsky was performing at the Tamarack Playhouse in the Adirondack Mountains when he adopted a more marquee-suitable name: Kirk Douglas.
He then moved to New York City, where he was accepted on a scholarship at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
During his two years at the academy, Douglas began dating fellow acting student Diana Dill, whom he later married and with whom he had two sons, Michael and Joel. He also became friends with another academy student: Betty Bacall, who, as Lauren Bacall, would later help set Douglas' Hollywood career in motion.
After graduating from the academy in 1941, Douglas did summer stock in a theater in Pennsylvania, where he worked his way up from bit parts to leading roles. Late that year, he made his Broadway debut — as a singing Western Union messenger in Guthrie McClintic's production of “Spring Again.”
“Then,” he later recalled, “we got into the war, and I married Diana, and all bets were off for the duration.”
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Douglas replaced Richard Widmark in the role of an Army lieutenant in the Broadway comedy “Kiss and Tell.” He had a few more brief appearances on Broadway before receiving a call from Hollywood.
Unbeknownst to Douglas, his friend Bacall had recommended him to producer Hal Wallis, who offered him a role in a movie he was producing starring Barbara Stanwyck.
Douglas made his film debut as the weak-willed, alcoholic husband of the rich and powerful heiress played by Stanwyck in the 1946 melodrama “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.”
Parts in a half-dozen films followed, and then came his Oscar-nominated starring role as the ambitious fighter Midge Kelly in the 1949 drama “Champion.”
“It was the type of role he was to portray best and most often in ensuing films — cocky, selfish, intense, forceful and egocentric,” wrote Ephraim Katz, author of “The Film Encyclopedia.”
Among Douglas' more than 20 film credits in the ’50s are “Young Man With a Horn,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Detective Story,” “The Juggler,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (with frequent co-star Burt Lancaster).
In early 1949 — five months before the release of “Champion” — Douglas' wife sued him for divorce. In his book, Douglas said he had been unfaithful. She died in 2015 at the age of 92.
In 1954, Douglas married Anne Buydens, whom he met in Paris when she helped him with press and translation while filming the romantic drama “Act of Love.” They had two sons, Peter and Eric.
On forming his own production company in 1955, Douglas once said: “I didn't want to be a mogul, but I wanted to have more say in what I would do.”
One of his company’s most ambitious productions was “Spartacus.”
In bringing the Howard Fast novel to the screen, Douglas and his company secretly hired the blacklisted Trumbo to write the screenplay. Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, had spent 10 months in federal prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
But like some other blacklisted writers, Trumbo continued to write under various pseudonyms or have other writers “front” for him. During this period, Trumbo’s uncredited writing earned two Academy Awards in the Motion Picture Story category, for “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One.”
With “Spartacus,” Douglas decided to defy the blacklist.
In his 2012 memoir “I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist,” Douglas said Edward Lewis, the producer of “Spartacus,” served as the “front” for Trumbo after they brought the big-budget project to Universal-International Pictures.
Douglas said, however, that both he and Lewis felt deeply about “the injustice of the blacklist.” And during production of the Stanley Kubrick-directed film in 1959, Douglas wrote, he told Trumbo that once the film was in the can, “not only am I going to tell them that you’ve written it, but we’re putting your name on it.”
Although it reportedly had become widely known that Trumbo had written the “Spartacus” script, it wasn’t until August 1960 that Universal-International announced that the blacklisted writer would receive screen credit.
That news, however, came seven months after filmmaker Otto Preminger generated headlines of his own.
In what the New York Times called “the first open defiance by a producer-director of Hollywood’s ‘blacklist,’” Preminger told the newspaper in January 1960 that Trumbo had written the script for Preminger’s forthcoming movie “Exodus” and that he would be giving Trumbo screen credit.
“Spartacus” was released in October 1960, followed by “Exodus” in December.
Over the years members of Trumbo's family and others have criticized Douglas for claiming credit for being the man who broke the blacklist, stressing that it was Preminger who first publicly announced that Trumbo's name would appear on screen for his work on "Exodus."
In a Times letter to the editor in 2002, Trumbo's widow, Cleo, said that "no single person can be credited with breaking the blacklist."
"While it took men of principle and courage like Preminger and Douglas to at long last defy the Hollywood studios, it is my unwavering conviction that it was primarily the efforts of blacklisted writers themselves that caused the blacklist to be broken," she wrote.
Trumbo’s son, Christopher, told The Times in 2003 that Douglas had been “highly instrumental in ending the blacklist” and that his father had always been grateful.
By openly employing Trumbo and giving him screen credit, Douglas wrote in “The Ragman’s Son,” he was attacked by the American Legion, which urged its members to boycott “Spartacus.” He also incurred the wrath of Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, who told her readers that “Spartacus” was “written by a Commie and the screen script was written by a Commie, so don't go see it.”
In a 1991 interview with The Times, Douglas discussed his decision to give Trumbo screen credit: “What I was fighting against was the hypocrisy in Hollywood, where the heads of the studios were using these blacklisted writers and just looking the other way, not paying them their full salary, making them use different names.”
In 1963, after buying the dramatic rights to Ken Kesey's novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Douglas returned to Broadway.
The play, which Douglas produced and starred in as the irrepressible Randle P. McMurphy, who feigns insanity to get out of doing work while in prison and is sent to a mental institution, closed two months after it opened. It was one of the biggest disappointments of Douglas' career.
After Douglas unsuccessfully tried for years to interest movie studios in a film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” with him as the star, Douglas' son Michael asked to have a chance at setting up the movie. Michael took it over, and he and Saul Zaentz produced the 1975 smash hit directed by Milos Forman that swept the Oscars with Jack Nicholson in the starring role that Douglas had always wanted to play.
In addition to Michael, Douglas' three other sons also followed him into show business. Peter and Joel became producers. Eric, who became an actor and stand-up comic and had a history of drug and alcohol problems, died at age 46 in 2004 of what authorities said was an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription tranquilizers and painkillers.
Beginning in 1963, Douglas served as an ambassador of goodwill, traveling around the world for the State Department and the United States Information Agency.
In 1981, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Two years later, he received the Jefferson Award for his public service; and he later received the French Legion of Honor.
For Douglas, the 1990s proved to be a decade of both triumph and struggle.
In 1991, he suffered a severe back injury when a helicopter he was a passenger in collided with a small plane during takeoff at Santa Paula Airport; the two men in the plane died. Then, in early 1996, he suffered a stroke.
At first, the stroke, which affected his speech, threw him into a deep depression. “I would pull down the blinds, crawl into bed and cry,” he told The Times in 1999. He later revealed that he contemplated suicide.
But he began pulling out of his depression some weeks after his stroke, he said, when his family persuaded him to accept an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.
Stepping on stage, he was greeted by a standing ovation.
Clasping his Oscar, he motioned toward his family and haltingly managed to say, “I see my four sons. They are proud of their old man. And I'm proud, too — proud to be part of Hollywood for 50 years. But this is for my wife, Anne. I love you.”
Douglas later said that, because of his stroke, “I thought, ‘That’s the end of me as an actor unless silent pictures come back.’ ”
But that wasn’t the case.
In 1999, he returned to the big screen in the comedy-adventure “Diamonds,” in which he starred as a feisty former welterweight boxing champion who has suffered a stroke and lost his wife. (The film included flashbacks of Douglas in the ring in “Champion.”)
Though panned by Roger Ebert, the critic nevertheless noted that, “As a demonstration of Kirk Douglas' heart and determination, it is inspiring.”
In 2000, Douglas received an Emmy nomination — the third Emmy nomination of his career — as outstanding guest actor in a drama series for his appearance on “Touched by an Angel.”
In 2003, Douglas realized a longtime dream of appearing on screen with son Michael when they co-starred in “It Runs in the Family” — a drama in which Kirk played Michael's father and Diana Douglas played his mother. Michael's son, Cameron, played his son.
Douglas and Michael also appeared together in Lee Grant's 2005 HBO documentary “A Father … A Son … Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” a candid and revealing dual portrait of father and son.
Over the years, Douglas and his wife, Anne, were involved in numerous charitable projects, including establishing a foundation that built playgrounds for children throughout Los Angeles and Israel, making significant gifts to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and providing funds for an Alzheimer's unit at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills.
A $2.5-million donation by the couple also kicked off fund raising for the Center Theatre Group's 300-seat theater that was constructed from the framework of an old Culver City movie house. The Kirk Douglas Theatre opened in 2004.
In 2009, at the age of 92, he returned to the stage at his namesake theater for “Before I Forget,” a one-man autobiographical sketch in which he looks over his life, his vulnerabilities, his triumphs. When he turned 100, and celebrated his centennial with a star-studded crowd at the Beverly Hills Hilton, his son Michael paused to admire his father’s later years when he dealt with losing a son, surviving a helicopter crash, clawing back from a stroke.
“One of the things that I find most incredible about dad,” he said, “is the third act of his life.”
Kirk Douglas, Indomitable Icon of Hollywood's Golden Age, Dies at 103
The actor starred in such films as 'Champion,' 'The Bad and the Beautiful,' 'Lust for Life,' 'Gunfight at the O.K. Corral' and 'Spartacus,' to name just a few.
Kirk Douglas, the son of a ragman who channeled a deep, personal anger through a chiseled jaw and steely blue eyes to forge one of the most indelible and indefatigable careers in Hollywood history, died Wednesday. He was 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” son Michael Douglas said in a statement obtained by People magazine. “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.”
Douglas walked away from a helicopter crash in 1991 and suffered a severe stroke in 1996 but, ever the battler, he refused to give in. With a passionate will to survive, he was the last man standing of all the great stars of another time.
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.
Perhaps most importantly, Douglas rebelled against the McCarthy Era establishment by producing and starring as a slave in Spartacus (1960), written by Dalton Trumbo, making the actor a hero to those blacklisted in Hollywood. The film became Universal’s biggest moneymaker, an achievement that stood for a decade.
Douglas’ many honors include the highest award that can be given to a U.S. civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The broad-chested Douglas often bucked the establishment with his opinions, and he had the courage to back them up. “I’ve always been a maverick," he once said. "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.”
Never one to toe the line with synthetic, movie star-type parts, Douglas played classic heels in a number of films. In 1951, he showed a keen flair for portraying strong-minded characters like the sleazy newspaper reporter in Billy Wilder’s The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) and the sadistic cop in William Wyler’s Detective Story. He played more sympathetic types in Out of the Past (1947), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) as Doc Holliday, Paths of Glory (1957) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1963).
Douglas was very particular in his role selection. “If I like a picture, I do it. I don’t stop to wonder if it’ll be successful or not,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I loved Lonely Are the Brave and Paths of Glory, but neither of them made a lot of money. No matter; I’m proud of them.”
His independent nature led him in 1955 to form his own independent film company, Bryna Productions. In the post-World War II era, Douglas was the first actor to take control of his career in this manner. Captaining his own ship, he soon launched a number of heady projects. Most auspiciously, he took a risk on a young Stanley Kubrick with Paths of Glory and Spartacus, films that feature two of Douglas’ finest performances. (He hired Kubrick for the latter after firing Anthony Mann a week into production.)
Indeed, Douglas backed his artistic and political opinions with action: His public announcement that blacklisted writer Trumbo would script Spartacus was a key moment in Hollywood’s re-acceptance of suspected communist figures.
During a Tonight Show appearance in August 1988 to promote his first book, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas told Johnny Carson that he often drew from personal experience for his work on film.
“What I found out when I wrote this book is I have a lot of anger in me,” he said. “I’m angry about things that happened many, many years ago. I think that anger has been a lot of the fuel that has helped me in whatever I’ve done.”
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in the industrial town of Amsterdam. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, raised seven children, and as soon as he was old enough, Douglas went to work to help support the family.
He put himself through St. Lawrence University by working as a janitor. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree, he moved to Manhattan where, as a result of a single reading for the head of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, received a special scholarship.
Soon after graduating from the academy in 1941, Douglas made his Broadway debut in Spring Again, starring Grace George and C. Aubrey Smith, playing a singing messenger boy. In 1942, he enlisted in the Navy, attending the Midshipman School at Notre Dame, and was commissioned an ensign. He served on anti-submarine patrol in the Pacific as a communications officer until 1944, when he was honorably discharged as a lieutenant.
Returning to civilian life and Broadway, he replaced Richard Widmark as the juvenile lead in Kiss and Tell and appeared in Trio and Star in the Window. It was his widely praised performance in The Wind Is Ninety that brought him to Hollywood’s attention. The year was 1946, and, at the suggestion of Lauren Bacall, producer Hal Wallis invited him to come to California for a screen test. Wallis was so impressed with Douglas that he cast him in the lead opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).
Douglas would work with some of the century’s top directors, starring in such memorable films as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and There Was a Crooked Man (1970), John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger.
For Bryna, Douglas also starred in The Indian Fighter (1955), The Vikings (1958), Lonely Are the Brave(1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and The Brotherhood (1968).
One regret the actor-producer had was with one of his longtime pet projects, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Douglas starred as Randle Patrick McMurphy in the 1963 Broadway adaption of the Ken Kesey book and had optioned the project, but he never managed to make it into a film.
His son Michael and Saul Zaentz eventually produced the movie, and released in 1975, it collected five Academy Awards, including one for best picture. He received half of Michael's share of the profits, and his son often joked that it was the most money dad had ever made as a producer.
"He's completely inspirational," Michael said during an interview at the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival. "When you finally reach an age when you're not feeling like you have to compete with your father and you can look at him [as an equal] … of course, that took me until I was 60."
A man of restless energy and various interests, Douglas supported many causes and worked in public service. During the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson eras, he toured widely for the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. State Department as a goodwill ambassador, going on missions to South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.
In 1966, on behalf of the State Department, Douglas visited six Iron Curtain countries: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. He often regaled acquaintances about a visit to Yugoslavia, where he managed a private visit with President Tito, much to the chagrin of the British ambassador who had been waiting for weeks for such an opportunity.
When the baffled British ambassador asked Douglas how he’d managed it, he replied, “Mr. Ambassador, how many movies have you made?” Realizing that a Hollywood star was in a unique position to enter domains beyond even established professionals, he sagely used his celebrity status to meet important people from all walks of life.
Successive presidents recognized Douglas’ good works: A citation of his efforts was inserted into the Congressional Record. In 1981, he received the Medal of Freedom for his “significant cultural endeavors as an actor and a goodwill ambassador.”
Further honors came to him in 1968 when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, during its Golden Globe ceremony, presented him with the Cecil B. DeMille Award. (In January 2017, he made a surprising visit to the Globes, serving as a presenter with his daughter-in-law, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.)
His humanitarian efforts earned him the American Award, presented by the Thomas A. Dooley Foundation. He was perhaps most proud of the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts conferred on him by his alma mater, St. Lawrence.
In March 2009, Douglas starred in an autobiographical one-man show, Before I Forget, at the Center Theater Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.
While making a film in France, Douglas met Parisienne Anne Buyden. They were married in 1954 and had two sons, Peter and Eric. In May, the actor's 11th book, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood, was published. (His first was his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son.)
On his 99th birthday, Douglas and his wife donated $15 million toward a new $35 million care center at the Motion Picture Television Fund home in Woodland Hills. She's 100 and survives him.
Sons Michael and Joel (a producer) were from Douglas’ 1943-51 marriage to actress Diana Dill, who died in 2015 at age 92.
