Michael Douglas

Michael Douglas (1944- ), American film actor, who succeeded in converting his close physical and temperamental resemblance to his famous father, Kirk Douglas, into a distinctive film persona of his own. Michael Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on September 25, 1944. Having cut his teeth on the long-running 1970s television series The Streets of San Francisco, Douglas established himself as a leading man in films such as Adam at Six A.M. (1970), Coma (1978), The China Syndrome (1979), and The Star Chamber (1983). He also co-produced the Academy-Award-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

Two swashbuckling adventure stories with Kathleen Turner, Romancing the Stone (1984) and Jewel of the Nile (1985), made Michael Douglas a box-office favourite, and he won an Academy Award (Oscar) for his role in Wall Street (1987, directed by Oliver Stone) as the repellent Gordon Gekko, but it was Fatal Attraction (1987) that found him his characteristic role as the good husband menaced by a scheming “other woman” (chillingly played by Glenn Close). The revenge of the henpecked middle-aged male took a further twist in the wickedly humorous The War of the Roses (1989), directed by Danny DeVito and again pairing Douglas with Kathleen Turner. Douglas then honed this character further in Basic Instinct (1992) and Disclosure (1994; Barry Levinson). In Falling Down (1993) he revelled in the paranoid and neurotic nature of his discarded hero, as he goes on the rampage through Los Angeles on a blisteringly hot day. However, a softer role in The American President (1995), as a love-lorn head of state, was less successful.

Thereafter, Douglas was a reliable presence in the thrillers The Game (1997); A Perfect Murder (1998), a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder; Traffic (2000; Steven Soderbergh), in which he starred alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he married that same year; and The Sentinel (2006), as a special agent caught up in a presidential assassination plot. Douglas was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globe Awards in 2004.