Kirk’s widow Anne Douglas has passed away at the age of 102

Los Angeles | Anne Douglas, the widow of Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, died Thursday at her home in Beverly Hills, days after she turned 102, according to her family.

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Died in February 2020, at the age of 103, he met Kirk Douglas Ann in 1953 in Paris, while he was filming “The Act of Love.”

After a frantic courtship, he married her in Las Vegas on May 29, 1954. “It was not romantic, but it was legal, and her new husband promised her that he would marry her one day. Once again with great fanfare,” his family recalled in the death notice sent to Agence France-Presse.

Kirk Douglas kept his promise on their 50th wedding anniversary in 2004.

The Douglas couple have been married for 66 years and have two sons, Peter and Eric. They formed a family with two other sons, Michael and Joel, the actor had from a previous union with Diana Dell. Anne Douglas called the latter “Our Ex-Wife”.

Anne Douglas Hanellor Marx was born to a German family in Hanover on April 23, 1919. She was sent to a Swiss boarding school, and she did not want to return to Hitler’s Germany and continued her education in Belgium, until the Nazis bombed Brussels in 1940.

Anne fled by car to France with some friends. Since she had German identity documents, her friends pushed her to marry Albert Boydens in order to obtain Belgian citizenship and became Anne Laurie Boydens.

She was soon overtaken by the occupation of German forces in France, but her mastery of many languages ​​enabled her to work for a French film distributor.

After the war, she continued her film career in France, working for NBC and then for John Huston in the production of “Moulin Rouge”, before meeting her husband.

Anne Douglas has invested a lot in art and charity.

In particular, Kirk persuaded Douglas to auction much of his art collection to fund the renovation of 400 playgrounds in Los Angeles schools in the late 1990s.

“I wondered a lot what would happen to me if I hadn’t married Anne,” Kirk Douglas fired, explaining that she “saved him from ruin” by telling him to be wary of his lawyer and rescued him “by refusing to get on a plane that crashed.

“I showed intense love when I was attacked and I think I cannot talk or work again,” the actor privately received.