The newly published memoirs of the Hollywood star, which in Spanish will bear the title Michael Douglas: A Whole Adventure (on sale in our country on November 26), revolve around the filming of some of his most popular movies such as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. And the two productions for which he earned Oscar honors: as a producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and as the star of Wall Street, where his portrayal of the stock market mogul Gordon Gekko earned him the Best Actor Oscar and helped to crystallize “greed is good” as a late-1980s motto.
In his autobiography, Michael Douglas does not hide his many years of excess during that era. There were even rumors that he was undergoing treatment for sex addiction. False, he states in his book, but he does acknowledge that, in the era when he met Catherine Zeta-Jones – whom he married in 2000 – he dated five other women. All of them lived in different cities, he explains in the book, but “as long as you weren’t dating another person in the same city who could embarrass her, there was no problem.”
“I have spent a large part of my life under the public spotlight, but I am a very private person. Fame can blur the truth. Now is the time to put it all back into perspective,” reads Michael Douglas’s memoirs. In them, he directly addresses his relationship with drugs and his brutal battle against stage IV cancer, as well as the complicated relationship with his father, Kirk Douglas: “I should have been born as Mikhail Danielovitch, the grandson of a street performer. Instead, I was born as Michael Kirk Douglas, son of Spartacus.”
The actor also speaks for the first time about his suspected, but never confirmed, romance with his co-star in Tras el corazón verde and The Jewel of the Nile, Kathleen Turner. At that time, Michael Douglas was married to producer Diandra Luker. “After a demanding day of shooting in the jungle, we would go out to dinner or we would go with the group and, afterward, I would slip into her hotel room when everyone was asleep,” the actor’s autobiography reveals.
Her separation from Catherine Zeta-Jones
One of the most talked-about chapters in the book concerns the ups and downs in the marriage with actress Catherine Zeta-Jones over the 25 years they have been together. In 2013, the couple went on vacation and, upon returning home, “we had a candid conversation,” Douglas writes in his memoirs. “We had been married for more than a decade. We had just gone through a period in which we had faced several challenges at once and we decided to take a break.”
The cover of Michael Douglas’s memoirs.
“We were still deeply in love, but we had to make sure that remaining married was the best thing for all of us. That whole experience was incredibly difficult,” the actor writes. “Catherine and I love each other with a very intense and profound love. And we love our children very much. We work hard to ensure they understood that this wasn’t anyone’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
In 2014, they had reconciled. Douglas writes that their marriage “deserved a second chance,” before sharing an update on the current state of their relationship. “Today, our marriage is stronger than ever and we recently celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. We still enjoy spending a lot of time together. We can play eighteen holes, take a walk on the beach, or simply sit on the sofa all day talking. After all these years, wherever we are in the world, Catherine Zeta-Jones remains an incredible伴侣.”
Her Movie Date with Princess Diana
Douglas admits he was very upset when he did not receive an Oscar nomination for Fatal Attraction (1987), although he won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar that same year for Wall Street. In his memoirs he recounts how he watched the film during its London premiere with Diana, Princess of Wales sitting next to him. “As the film progressed, I grew a little concerned about the language my character, Gordon Gekko, uses,” the actor writes.
Michael Douglas in Wall Street.
“I remember that, at one point, I leaned toward her and whispered an apology. She looked me in the eyes, smiled, and laughed. She didn’t mind at all, and couldn’t have been kinder. It was a difficult time for Princess Diana,” Douglas adds. “Her marriage to Prince Charles was collapsing, very publicly. On a smaller scale, the same thing was happening to me with Diandra, so I could identify with her.”
After the film, there was a private dinner and Douglas adds that he had “the luck to spend some time alone with Princess Diana, away from all the cameras. While we talked, everything around us faded away and it became clear to me that the stories published by the tabloids about her were wrong or, at the very least, incredibly incomplete. The truth was simple: she was in an unhappy marriage and wanted a different life.”
