Michael Douglas: Acting On Instinct
By John Parker
Headline Books
As a young boy, Michael Douglas once walked on to a film set during the shooting of a torrid love scene between his father, Kirk Douglas, and Lana Turner. The image remained with him for many years. “How can I possibly be the man this man is?” he remembers thinking.
Although he seemed doomed forever to be branded “the son of Spartacus”, Douglas eventually eclipsed even his father’s prodigious career to become one of HollywoodÕs most bankable stars and a hugely successful producer.
Inevitably, there were other less healthy legacies of a life in movies: along with fame and fortune came sexual promiscuity, alcoholism and drug dependency.
John Parker’s biography charts the rise of one of Tinseltown’s brightest stars - from his youth, to Oscar success as Gordon “greed is good” Gekko in Wall Street, and on to eventual contentment with his marriage to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Douglas had initially showed little inclination to follow in Kirk’s Hollywood footsteps, spending much of his childhood on the other side of the United States with his mother, actress Diana Dill.
But he dabbled in drama in his early 20s and then had a breakthrough with a TV series, The Streets Of San Francisco. The show teamed him alongside Hollywood veteran Karl Malden and attracted audiences of 25 million. His face, writes Parker, “until then largely unknown, became instantly recognisable across the globe”.
A number of moderately successful movie roles followed, yet it was as a producer that the aspiring Douglas achieved the status he craved.
For years, his father Kirk had been trying to persuade Hollywood to approve a film version of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Yet it was Michael who eventually took up the project and made it happen. Blessed by a mesmeric central performance by Jack Nicholson (Kirk had contemplated starring in it but realised he was too old), the film won all five major Oscars in 1975 - for best actor, best actress, best film, best director and best adapted screenplay - and launched Douglas into orbit.
Over the next few years he enjoyed success both in front of and behind the lens, most notably in the action picture Romancing The Stone, alongside Kathleen Turner.
Even so, there were questions as to whether this dynamic, sensitive young man had the killer instinct needed for Hollywood. Jack Lemmon once said that when Douglas gave you his best shot, “it was like being hit with a thousand powder puffs”.
It was only when Douglas turned to portray darker, more complex individuals that he found his creative niche, in particular in three of his most memorable films - Fatal Attraction, Wall Street and Basic Instinct.
At his best, he excelled in portraying men caught up in events beyond their control, often at the mercy of powerful, unpredictable women.
Richard Attenborough, who directed him in the musical A Chorus Line, had no doubt as to the secret of DouglasÕs particular brand of movie magic. Like Spencer Tracy, he believed that behind Ôthat delicate facade lay an imminent explosionÕ. Attenborough also had another recollection of working with his star - “he never let a leotard go by” Ð a fact not lost on Douglas’s long- suffering wife Diandra, to whom he was married for 23 turbulent years.
But it was his subsequent marriage to Zeta-Jones, 25 years his junior, that finally brought Douglas relief from the unrelenting drive that had ruled his life.
The couple met in Deauville, France, in August 1998, and despite an unprepossessing introduction (“I’d like to father your children,” was Douglas’s toe-curling opening remark), their subsequent union became that rarest of Hollywood commodities: a genuinely happy marriage.
“The workaholic who lived life to the full had settled into a lifestyle in which wife and family came above all else,” notes the author. Having recently suffered and apparently beaten throat cancer, Douglas is now tipped to portray Liberace on the big screen.
Parker’s well-researched biography chronicles his subject’s life and times with obvious appreciation. Yet despite this it remains a stubbornly anodyne portrait - in particular Douglas’s many problems with addiction are handled with a delicacy bordering on the coy.
Nonetheless, fans of the actor will enjoy this undemanding trawl through his life and times.