Two-time Academy Award winning actor Michael Douglas has opened up about his fraught relationship with his screen legend father Kirk.
Wall Street and Fatal Attraction star Michael (82) recently published his new book One Helluva Ride in which he reflects on his 60-year film career and reveals much about his private life including how his father, who died aged 103 in 2020, once told him he was a “terrible actor”.
Kirk Douglas
Speaking via Zoom on the Oliver Callan Show on RTÉ Radio I on Friday, he said, “He was overwhelmed by his career. It just took first place and family and friends took second place.
“In the third act of his life, when he had a helicopter crash and was recovering, he became more religious and turned to the Old Testament and studied that.
“He became more spiritual and kind and as happens to a lot of people as their career dwindles, you get more time to focus on your family and we were very close.
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“I admired him. Most people haven’t had a father like Spartacus, larger than life. You just question whether you can ever be the man that he is.”
In One Helluva Ride, Douglas says his father was less than complimentary about his son’s acting skills at the start of his career.
“He came to my first production, came backstage and said ‘Michael, you were terrible!’ and he was relieved because he thought I wouldn’t become an actor because we have a very high rate of unemployment,” he said.
Kirk Douglas in 1973
“But I worked harder at it in college and by the time I graduated, he came back and said ‘Michael, you were good’.
“He was very supportive and later in life he said ‘Michael, if I had known you were going to be so successful I would have been nicer to you’.”
Douglas, who has been married to Welsh actress Catherine Zeta Jones for 26 years, also spoke about his love for Ireland, “I’ve spent a lot of time over there playing golf with Catherine, that was the closer when we first met – I asked her did she play golf and she said I love golf, it brought tears to my eyes and it went from there.”
He and Catherine, with whom he has two children, Dylan and Cerys, share a birthday and they celebrated his eightieth in Ireland two years ago playing golf at Adare Manor, a trip that also saw them being serenaded by Bono.
Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones
“He was very sweet,” Douglas said. “Catherine was filming over there, she was playing Morticia in Wednesday, and the house she rented was very close to Bono and we’ve known him for a while and we went over to say hello and he couldn’t have been sweeter.
“We had a birthday cake and the two of them sang Happy Birthday together. We had a nice time, the usual great Irish spirit.”
One Helluva Ride was initially intended to be a textbook about movie making but Douglas said it became more of an autobiography as he was writing.
“I started the book as a textbook about producing. I took ten of my movies and did a chapter on each of them, starting from the beginning, what a producer does to put it together to make a full production.
“Then I started to realise my private life came into it so I made the decision to take a deep breath and share it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Asked what he felt most vulnerable about sharing, he said, “The stuff about my father and some of the conflicts that we had that people didn’t really know about.
“I talk about some of the ladies I’d been with earlier in my career. Me and Kathleen Turner did a movie that exposed the fact that we were together, it’s been a forty-year secret and people seem to enjoy that.
“So the book focuses on my career, my bout with cancer and how that changed my thinking. It’s got a few laughs, some sad moments.”
Before he wrote the book, he called some of his exes to get their blessing for him to open up with their former relationships.
“Those conversations went pretty well,” Douglas told Callan. “I said ‘hi, Kathleen, I’m doing a book and I want to include the fact that you and I were more than just working partners’ and she said ‘sure, it was forty years ago, why not?’
“And the same situation happened with Jeanne Tripplehorn on Basic Instinct. I called her up. She’s been happily married for twenty years and she said sure.
Douglas, who memorably played a rather idealised version of the leader of the US in the 1995 movie The American President, also spoke about how current US leader Donald Trump nearly made an appearance in the sequel to Wall Street.
“We left him on the cutting room floor,” the actor said. “The scene was me and him in a barber shop getting a haircut but ultimately it was cut.”
Asked if he was hopeful that the Democrats will win both the House of Congress and the Senate in this Tuesday’s mid-term elections, Douglas said, “I am more than hopeful. I’m praying and hopefully we can end this nightmare.
“I can’t believe the damage that has been done to our country and our relations with the rest of the world in only two years.
“I personally apologise. We have severed close friendships we have developed since World War Two and I am very upset by his [Trump’s] alliances with Putin. We should be full-on supporting Ukraine.”
Douglas also spoke about his work campaigning for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and he writes in his book’s epilogue that he is saddened that he is unlikely to see it happen in his lifetime.