Michael Douglas (1944) is an American actor-producer best known for his roles in films like Wall Street (1987), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Basic Instinct (1992). The elder son of Kirk Douglas gained fame after starring in the police series Streets of San Francisco (1972–1977). Douglas branched out into independent feature production in 1975 with the acclaimed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which he won an Oscar as one of the film's producers. Starring roles followed in The China Syndrome (1979), Romancing the Stone (1984), and Wall Street (1987), for which he won his second Oscar. Later films include Traffic (2000), Wonder Boys (2000), the Emmy Award-winning Behind the Candelabra (2013), and Ant-Man (2015).
![Michael Douglas]()
German collectors card by Bravo, ca. 1980.
![Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992)]()
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
Michael Kirk Douglas was born in 1944, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to film legend Kirk Douglas and his wife, British actress Diana Dill. Douglas grew up with three brothers: Joel, Peter, and Eric. Douglas's parents divorced when he was six, and he went to live with his mother and her new husband.
Only seeing Kirk on holidays, Michael attended the Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he was about a year younger than all of his classmates. Douglas's strained relationship with his father developed more as he progressed through life. Douglas attended the elite preparatory the Choate Rosemary Hall School and spent his summers with his father on film sets.
Deciding he wanted to be an actor in his teenage years, Michael often asked his father about getting a 'foot in the door'. Kirk was strongly opposed to Michael pursuing an acting career, saying that it was an industry with many downs and few ups and that he wanted all four of his sons to stay out of it. Michael, however, was persistent and studied drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and the American Place Theatre.
Michael began his Hollywood career as an assistant director on some of his father's 1960s films. He made his film acting debut in his father's film Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966). A few months after moving to New York, Douglas got his first big break, when he was cast in the pivotal role of the free-spirited scientist who compromises his liberal views to accept a lucrative job with a high-tech chemical corporation in the CBS Playhouse production of Ellen M. Violett's drama, The Experiment (1969).
Then followed the leading role in the adaptation of John Weston's controversial novel, Hail, Hero! (David Miller, 1969). His performance in this Vietnam-era antiwar film earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Male Newcomer. He played a well-meaning, almost saintly young pacifist determined not only to justify his beliefs to his conservative parents but also to test them under fire in the jungles of Indochina.
He made a handful of mostly forgettable films. The best was the Disney-produced family adventure Napoleon and Samantha (1972) with the young Jodie Foster. Finally, Douglas became well-known as the sidekick of Karl Malden in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977). The police series became one of ABC's highest-rated prime-time programs in the mid-1970s. Douglas earned three successive Emmy Award nominations for his performance and he directed two episodes of the show.
During the annual breaks in the shooting schedule for The Streets of San Francisco, Douglas devoted his time to his film production company, Big Stick Productions, Ltd., which produced several short subjects in the early 1970s. He got involved in (executive) producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) after his father, who owned the rights to Ken Kesey's novel since the early 1960s, couldn't successfully develop it into a film for many years. After a number of major studios turned Michael down, he formed a partnership with Saul Zaentz, a record industry executive, and the two set about recruiting the cast and crew. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975). It became the second film in Hollywood history to win Oscars in all five major categories: best picture, best actor (Jack Nicholson), best actress (Louise Fletcher), best director (Miloš Forman). The film grossed more than $180 million at the box office.
Despite the success of the film, it was difficult for Douglas to find work as an actor, having received so much recognition as a producer. After leaving The Streets of San Francisco in 1976, Douglas played a hospital doctor in the medical thriller Coma (Michael Crichton, 1978) with Genevieve Bujold, Claudia Weill's feminist comedy It's My Turn (1980) starring Jill Clayburgh, and Peter Hyams' gripping tale of modern-day vigilante justice, The Star Chamber (1983).
Douglas then co-produced and co-starred with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon in The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979), a drama about a nuclear power plant accident. The film received Oscar nominations for Lemmon and Fonda, as well as for Best Screenplay. The National Board of Review named the film one of the best films of the year. The following year, Douglas was involved in a serious skiing accident that sidelined his acting career for three years.
![Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (1984)]()
French postcard by Edition Erving, Paris, no. 702. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984).
Michael Douglas became a star with his leading role in tongue-in-cheek romantic fantasy Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984). He portrayed Jack Colton, an Indiana Jones-type adventurer, opposite Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, the dowdy writer of gothic romances, and Danny DeVito as the feisty comic foil Ralphie. Romancing was a resounding hit and grossed more than $100 million at the box office. Their successful teaming led to a sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (Lewis Teague, 1985). The three worked again in The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989), a dark comedy about an ugly divorce.
In between, he played Zach the dictatorial director/choreographer in Richard Attenborough's screen version of Broadway's longest-running musical A Chorus Line (1985). In 1987, Douglas made two films that reflected a much darker side: the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), in which he played an adulterer stalked by an ex-lover — played by Glenn Close— and Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987), in which he played the ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, whose trademark slogan is "Greed is good". For this role, he won an Oscar for Best Actor.
Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Several of Douglas’s performances flaunt this dichotomy: his villainous characters exhibit personal magnetism, and his heroes are often victim to their own inadequacies. He (like his father) was one of the few actors to build a successful career out of portraying less-than-virtuous characters."
Douglas next starred in Ridley Scott's thriller Black Rain (1989) He continued exploring his dark side in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), co-starring Sharon Stone. The film was one of the year's top-grossing films and sparked controversy over its depictions of bisexuality and lesbianism.
In 1988, Douglas formed a production company, Stonebridge Entertainment, Inc., which produced Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) and Radio Flyer (Richard Donner, 1992). In 1992, he began a 30-day treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction at Sierra Tucson Center.
Douglas gave one of his most powerful performances opposite Robert Duvall in Joel Schumacher's controversial drama Falling Down (1993). That year, he also produced the hit comedy Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993) starring Whoopi Goldberg, then starred opposite Demi Moore as a sexually harassed man in Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994), based on the bestseller by Michael Crichton, and as the titular commander-in-chief in the romantic comedy The American President (Rob Reiner, 1995), co-starring Annette Bening.
![Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (1984)]()
French postcard by Ebullitions, no. 12. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984).
![Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992)]()
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
In 1994, Michael Douglas signed a development deal at Paramount that included The Ghost and the Darkness (Stephen Hopkins, 1996), The Game (David Fincher, 1997) with Sean Penn, and A Perfect Murder (Andrew Davis, 1998). He executive produced The Rainmaker (Francis Ford Coppola, 1997), starring Matt Damon, as well as the action film, Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
Douglas earned critical acclaim for his starring role as a rumpled college professor and novelist suffering from writer's block in Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) co-starring Tobey Maguire and Frances McDormand. In Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), Douglas played Robert Wakefield, a newly appointed drug czar confronted by the drug war both at home and abroad. Traffic was named Best Picture by New York Film Critics and won four Oscars (Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio del Toro).
Douglas then headlined the psychological thriller Don't Say a Word (Gary Fleder, 2001), co-starring Brittany Murphy. He featured alongside his famous father, his mother, and his son, Cameron in It Runs in the Family (2003), about a multi-generational dysfunctional Manhattan family clan trying to get along. The film fared poorly at the box office. In 2004 Michael and Kirk filmed the intimate HBO documentary A Father, A Son... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Lee Grant, the documentary examines the professional and personal lives of both men, and the impacts they each made on the film industry.
In 2010, Douglas announced that he would be reprising his role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010), a sequel set in 2008 amid the global financial crisis. Once again, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance. Douglas went on to play the famous 1950s and 1960s entertainer Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013), a witty account of Liberace’s private life near the end of his career. Matt Damon played his partner Scott Thorson in the critically acclaimed television film. Douglas won an Emmy Award for his role.
He also filmed Last Vegas (John Turtletaub, 2013) with Robert De Niro. In the following years, Douglas starred opposite Diane Keaton in And So It Goes (Rob Reiner, 2014) and the Marvel superhero action/comedy Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015) opposite Paul Rudd. He reprised his role as biochemist Hank Pym in the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018) and also appeared in the superhero film Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019).
In 1977, Michael Douglas married Diandra Luker. They had one son, Cameron, but separated in 1995 and later divorced. In 2000, Douglas married Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, his Traffic co-star. The couple welcomed a son, Dylan Michael Douglas, in 2000, followed by daughter Carys Zeta Douglas in 2003. In 2013, Douglas and Zeta-Jones separated after more than 12 years of marriage, but they reconciled in 2014. In 2017, he became a grandfather when his son Cameron Douglas and his girlfriend Viviane Thibes welcomed a daughter, Lua Izzy Douglas.
Outside of his busy acting career, Michael Douglas is active in promoting human rights. His work in this area includes serving as a United Nations messenger of peace. Douglas recently starred as as an aging actor turned acting teacher in Chuck Lorre's comedy series The Kominsky Method (2018-2019), for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy, and in the Netflix series Green Eggs and Ham (2019), based on Dr. Seuss’s children’s classic, where he voices Guy-Am-I.
![Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct (1992)]()
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
![Jeanne Tripplehorn, Michael Douglas, Paul Verhoeven, Sharon Stone, at the Premiere of Basic Instinct in Cannes]()
Big photo, 1993. Jeanne Tripplehorn, Michael Douglas, Paul Verhoeven, Sharon Stone at the Premiere of Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) in Cannes.
Sources: Alburry and James Briggs (IMDb), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Biography.com, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
German collectors card by Bravo, ca. 1980.
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
Only seeing Kirk on holidays
Michael Kirk Douglas was born in 1944, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to film legend Kirk Douglas and his wife, British actress Diana Dill. Douglas grew up with three brothers: Joel, Peter, and Eric. Douglas's parents divorced when he was six, and he went to live with his mother and her new husband.
Only seeing Kirk on holidays, Michael attended the Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he was about a year younger than all of his classmates. Douglas's strained relationship with his father developed more as he progressed through life. Douglas attended the elite preparatory the Choate Rosemary Hall School and spent his summers with his father on film sets.
Deciding he wanted to be an actor in his teenage years, Michael often asked his father about getting a 'foot in the door'. Kirk was strongly opposed to Michael pursuing an acting career, saying that it was an industry with many downs and few ups and that he wanted all four of his sons to stay out of it. Michael, however, was persistent and studied drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and the American Place Theatre.
Michael began his Hollywood career as an assistant director on some of his father's 1960s films. He made his film acting debut in his father's film Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966). A few months after moving to New York, Douglas got his first big break, when he was cast in the pivotal role of the free-spirited scientist who compromises his liberal views to accept a lucrative job with a high-tech chemical corporation in the CBS Playhouse production of Ellen M. Violett's drama, The Experiment (1969).
Then followed the leading role in the adaptation of John Weston's controversial novel, Hail, Hero! (David Miller, 1969). His performance in this Vietnam-era antiwar film earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Male Newcomer. He played a well-meaning, almost saintly young pacifist determined not only to justify his beliefs to his conservative parents but also to test them under fire in the jungles of Indochina.
He made a handful of mostly forgettable films. The best was the Disney-produced family adventure Napoleon and Samantha (1972) with the young Jodie Foster. Finally, Douglas became well-known as the sidekick of Karl Malden in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977). The police series became one of ABC's highest-rated prime-time programs in the mid-1970s. Douglas earned three successive Emmy Award nominations for his performance and he directed two episodes of the show.
During the annual breaks in the shooting schedule for The Streets of San Francisco, Douglas devoted his time to his film production company, Big Stick Productions, Ltd., which produced several short subjects in the early 1970s. He got involved in (executive) producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) after his father, who owned the rights to Ken Kesey's novel since the early 1960s, couldn't successfully develop it into a film for many years. After a number of major studios turned Michael down, he formed a partnership with Saul Zaentz, a record industry executive, and the two set about recruiting the cast and crew. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975). It became the second film in Hollywood history to win Oscars in all five major categories: best picture, best actor (Jack Nicholson), best actress (Louise Fletcher), best director (Miloš Forman). The film grossed more than $180 million at the box office.
Despite the success of the film, it was difficult for Douglas to find work as an actor, having received so much recognition as a producer. After leaving The Streets of San Francisco in 1976, Douglas played a hospital doctor in the medical thriller Coma (Michael Crichton, 1978) with Genevieve Bujold, Claudia Weill's feminist comedy It's My Turn (1980) starring Jill Clayburgh, and Peter Hyams' gripping tale of modern-day vigilante justice, The Star Chamber (1983).
Douglas then co-produced and co-starred with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon in The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979), a drama about a nuclear power plant accident. The film received Oscar nominations for Lemmon and Fonda, as well as for Best Screenplay. The National Board of Review named the film one of the best films of the year. The following year, Douglas was involved in a serious skiing accident that sidelined his acting career for three years.
French postcard by Edition Erving, Paris, no. 702. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984).
Greed is good
Michael Douglas became a star with his leading role in tongue-in-cheek romantic fantasy Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984). He portrayed Jack Colton, an Indiana Jones-type adventurer, opposite Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, the dowdy writer of gothic romances, and Danny DeVito as the feisty comic foil Ralphie. Romancing was a resounding hit and grossed more than $100 million at the box office. Their successful teaming led to a sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (Lewis Teague, 1985). The three worked again in The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989), a dark comedy about an ugly divorce.
In between, he played Zach the dictatorial director/choreographer in Richard Attenborough's screen version of Broadway's longest-running musical A Chorus Line (1985). In 1987, Douglas made two films that reflected a much darker side: the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), in which he played an adulterer stalked by an ex-lover — played by Glenn Close— and Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987), in which he played the ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, whose trademark slogan is "Greed is good". For this role, he won an Oscar for Best Actor.
Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Several of Douglas’s performances flaunt this dichotomy: his villainous characters exhibit personal magnetism, and his heroes are often victim to their own inadequacies. He (like his father) was one of the few actors to build a successful career out of portraying less-than-virtuous characters."
Douglas next starred in Ridley Scott's thriller Black Rain (1989) He continued exploring his dark side in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), co-starring Sharon Stone. The film was one of the year's top-grossing films and sparked controversy over its depictions of bisexuality and lesbianism.
In 1988, Douglas formed a production company, Stonebridge Entertainment, Inc., which produced Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) and Radio Flyer (Richard Donner, 1992). In 1992, he began a 30-day treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction at Sierra Tucson Center.
Douglas gave one of his most powerful performances opposite Robert Duvall in Joel Schumacher's controversial drama Falling Down (1993). That year, he also produced the hit comedy Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993) starring Whoopi Goldberg, then starred opposite Demi Moore as a sexually harassed man in Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994), based on the bestseller by Michael Crichton, and as the titular commander-in-chief in the romantic comedy The American President (Rob Reiner, 1995), co-starring Annette Bening.
French postcard by Ebullitions, no. 12. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984).
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
A Father, A Son... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
In 1994, Michael Douglas signed a development deal at Paramount that included The Ghost and the Darkness (Stephen Hopkins, 1996), The Game (David Fincher, 1997) with Sean Penn, and A Perfect Murder (Andrew Davis, 1998). He executive produced The Rainmaker (Francis Ford Coppola, 1997), starring Matt Damon, as well as the action film, Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
Douglas earned critical acclaim for his starring role as a rumpled college professor and novelist suffering from writer's block in Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) co-starring Tobey Maguire and Frances McDormand. In Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), Douglas played Robert Wakefield, a newly appointed drug czar confronted by the drug war both at home and abroad. Traffic was named Best Picture by New York Film Critics and won four Oscars (Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio del Toro).
Douglas then headlined the psychological thriller Don't Say a Word (Gary Fleder, 2001), co-starring Brittany Murphy. He featured alongside his famous father, his mother, and his son, Cameron in It Runs in the Family (2003), about a multi-generational dysfunctional Manhattan family clan trying to get along. The film fared poorly at the box office. In 2004 Michael and Kirk filmed the intimate HBO documentary A Father, A Son... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Lee Grant, the documentary examines the professional and personal lives of both men, and the impacts they each made on the film industry.
In 2010, Douglas announced that he would be reprising his role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010), a sequel set in 2008 amid the global financial crisis. Once again, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance. Douglas went on to play the famous 1950s and 1960s entertainer Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013), a witty account of Liberace’s private life near the end of his career. Matt Damon played his partner Scott Thorson in the critically acclaimed television film. Douglas won an Emmy Award for his role.
He also filmed Last Vegas (John Turtletaub, 2013) with Robert De Niro. In the following years, Douglas starred opposite Diane Keaton in And So It Goes (Rob Reiner, 2014) and the Marvel superhero action/comedy Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015) opposite Paul Rudd. He reprised his role as biochemist Hank Pym in the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018) and also appeared in the superhero film Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019).
In 1977, Michael Douglas married Diandra Luker. They had one son, Cameron, but separated in 1995 and later divorced. In 2000, Douglas married Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, his Traffic co-star. The couple welcomed a son, Dylan Michael Douglas, in 2000, followed by daughter Carys Zeta Douglas in 2003. In 2013, Douglas and Zeta-Jones separated after more than 12 years of marriage, but they reconciled in 2014. In 2017, he became a grandfather when his son Cameron Douglas and his girlfriend Viviane Thibes welcomed a daughter, Lua Izzy Douglas.
Outside of his busy acting career, Michael Douglas is active in promoting human rights. His work in this area includes serving as a United Nations messenger of peace. Douglas recently starred as as an aging actor turned acting teacher in Chuck Lorre's comedy series The Kominsky Method (2018-2019), for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy, and in the Netflix series Green Eggs and Ham (2019), based on Dr. Seuss’s children’s classic, where he voices Guy-Am-I.
Spanish postcard by Novograf. Photo: Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
Big photo, 1993. Jeanne Tripplehorn, Michael Douglas, Paul Verhoeven, Sharon Stone at the Premiere of Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) in Cannes.
Sources: Alburry and James Briggs (IMDb), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Biography.com, Wikipedia, and IMDb.