Actor Kirk Douglas, who helped end Hollywood blacklist, dies at 103

LOS ANGELES — 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 postWorld 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 slaverevolt 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 moviegoer in the late 1940s.

“I immediately focused on him because he was different,” Basinger told the Los Angeles 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.

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.

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.

AFP via Getty Images In this 1978 photo, actor Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne, pose at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport near Paris. Kirk Douglas, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants who rose through the ranks to become one of Hollywood's biggest-ever stars, has died at 103.