Kirk and Michael Douglas.
(Image credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images)

Actor Kirk Douglas, a star of Hollywood's Golden Age, died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 103.

Douglas played a boxer in 1949's Champion, the movie that propelled him to stardom, and created his own film company, Bryna Productions in 1955. He starred in more than 80 movies before retiring from film in 2004, including 1960's Spartacus, serving as a producer and working with blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nominated three times for the Best Actor Academy Award, and received an honorary Oscar in 1996.

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Douglas survived a helicopter crash in 1991 and suffered a debilitating stroke in 1996. Married to his wife Anne since 1954, his 11th and final book, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood, was published in May.

In a message posted online Wednesday afternoon, son Michael Douglas wrote, "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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.