Whenever an older, revered icon of the film industry dies, there are plenty of testimonials and remembrances written about that person. But it’s sad that we only take the time to fully appreciate these people’s brilliance after their passing. Hence, The Greats, a biweekly column that celebrates cinema’s living legends.
Although he has several memorable films associated with his name, Michael Douglas isn’t defined by any of them. He’s bigger than his movies, and large enough to escape the sizable shadow of his famous father. He’s not just a persona, but we probably think of him more as a star than an actor. That’s nothing to be ashamed of: Douglas carries his pictures in a way that goes beyond character motivations or craft. He’s a movie star because it’s impossible to imagine him as anything else.
Born in September 1944, Douglas grew up as the son of Kirk, who was just about to begin a career as a film actor. In a 1986 interview in Playboy, Kirk said of his boy, “If I’d known what a big shot Michael was going to be, I would have been nicer to him when he was a kid. For one thing, Michael had a hatred and contempt for the world of entertainment when he was growing up; I thought he might make a good lawyer.” By the time Michael was seven, his mother Diana had filed for divorce. (Kirk had been sleeping around.) In Marc Eliot’s biography of Michael Douglas, the younger man recalled, “I think my earliest memory was about three, and it was them fighting. Not physically fighting, but arguing. Voices being raised.”
Though Douglas grew up on the East Coast, he went to college in Santa Barbara. (He’d heard that there were far more female students there than male.) At first, his interest in theater came from laziness: He figured it wouldn’t be that hard of a major. As hetold New York in 2013, “God bless Dad, he came to every one of my shows. I was bad, and I had horrible stage fright. My dad was so relieved—he’d say, ‘You were terrible, this kid is not going to be an actor.’ Finally, I did a play and he said, ‘Son—you were really good.’”
The burgeoning actor’s big breakthrough was The Streets of San Francisco, a cop show, which aired on ABC starting in 1972. Karl Malden got top billing, but Douglas felt like he’d arrived. “That was the first time I was famous on my own,” he told New York. “Being second generation in Hollywood is complicated: Success is expected, and yet the track record of the second generation is not great. Only a small group of us, like Jane Fonda, have succeeded. The good and the bad of being second generation is there are no illusions: I always knew that this was a business. It can be wonderful, but it is a business.”
By the mid-1970s, Kirk Douglas had already been nominated three times for Best Actor, as well as starred in classics like Ace in the Hole and Paths of Glory, helping to bring the latter’s director, Stanley Kubrick, to the attention of Hollywood by drafting him to shepherd the big-budget Spartacus. But it was Michael who received an Oscar first. Kirk had read galleys of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, in the early ’60s and bought the rights. The book was adapted for Broadway, and Kirk played the story’s antihero, Randle McMurphy. For years, Kirk tried to make it into a movie, but Michael made it happen.
“It was, in fact, a classic story: the story of an individual man fighting the system,” Michael told Playboy in 1986 about his love of Cuckoo’s Nest. “Particularly in the ’60s, people identified with this individual trying to overpower the establishment and, at the same time, breathe life into a group of men who had been buried by the system. … So I said to my father, ‘Look, I love this thing. Let me take it.’ I told him I would get the money he was looking for. Also, he originally wanted to play the part of McMurphy. By then, he had become a little older than the character, so his interest diminished because of that. Finally, he said OK. I think he saw it as an opportunity for me to learn about the business.”
In 1975, the film came out, winning five Oscars, including Best Actor for Jack Nicholson and Best Picture for Michael Douglas and fellow producer Saul Zaentz. At the time, Douglas was still primarily a TV actor, but the Oscar win successfully transitioned him into film. Not that the films were great: In the late ’70s, he did forgotten pictures like Coma and Running, with The China Syndrome the hit in between.
But perhaps because Douglas knew from an early age that the most important part of the phrase “show business” was the second word, he managed to navigate the 1980s much more confidently than peers who had been prominent in the previous decade, only to discover that Hollywood was becoming more of a blockbuster industry.
First, there were the Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile films, silly Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoffs that were enlivened by Douglas’s chemistry with costar Kathleen Turner. (And don’t forget Douglas’s old pal Danny DeVito, whom he’d known since the mid-’60s.) The movies, which were huge hits, allowed Douglas to undercut his beautiful features with a knowing sense of humor.
In a sense, ever since he’s played versions of Jack Colton: a handsome man of the world who isn’t all that he seems. How else to explain his predilection for portraying impressive men laid low by their own failings? It’s the line that connects the dots from his philandering husband in Fatal Attraction to the jilted, vengeful husband in War of the Roses to his seduced detective in Basic Instinct. Interestingly, the one movie in this span from the late ’80s to the early ’90s that most runs contrary to that pattern is the one for which he won Best Actor.
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