Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas leaves most of £47m fortune to charity
The Spartacus actor left £38.4 million to the Douglas Foundation launched with his wife Anne in 1964 to 'help those who cannot otherwise help themselves'
The screen legend Kirk Douglas, who died in Beverley Hills this month at the age of 103, has reportedly left the bulk of his £47m fortune to charity.
The actor left “nothing” to his son, the 75-year-old star of Basic Instinct, Michael, who is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones and worth an estimated £213,7 million, the Mirror reported at the weekend.
According to the report, the Spartacus actor left around £38.5 million to the Douglas Foundation launched with his wife Anne in 1964 to “help those who cannot otherwise help themselves.”
According to its website, Douglas and his wife set up the foundation “to give back – not only in thanks for their many blessings, but as a means of teaching their children and grandchildren the lessons they had learned.”
The organisation has in the past funded a scholarship for minority and underprivileged students at St Lawrence University in New York and revamped an abandoned venue as a live performance theatre.
It has given funding to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to pay for a surgical robot to be used on toddlers in the medical facility’s paediatric urology department.
Douglas, who went on to become one of Hollywood’s greats, was born Issur Danielovitch to an impoverished Jewish family living in the town of Amsterdam in New York.
The actor’s family paid tribute to him earlier this month. “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,” read a statement.
“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,” it said.
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