(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 20 December 2025 12:30, UK
Michael Douglas is one of the original nepo babies, but that doesn’t mean he was handed his two Oscars on a silver platter. Actually, one of them kind of was. In 1976, he took home a little gold man for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film that he produced because his dad, Kirk Douglas, gave up on it.
As an actor, though, Douglas has earned his proverbial stripes. From championing the value of greed in Wall Street to menacing a fast food worker over the size of the burgers in Falling Down, he was one of America’s most powerful screen actors for several decades and equalled his old man when it came to his credentials as a leading man.
According to Douglas himself, though, it might never have happened. Early in his career, he took on a role that he thought could be his last. The film was Hail, Hero!, a 1969 drama about a university student who joins the army to fight in Vietnam despite having originally aligned himself with the hippie movement.
It was a movie that should have fit the roiling anti-war sentiments of the era, but it missed the mark at every step. It never explains why the protagonist would have such a radical change of heart, for example, and many of the emotional beats are contrived and comically heavy-handed.
Speaking to the Associated Press in 2009 (via Deseret News), the actor remembered, “[This] could have been the beginning and the end of my career.”
It wasn’t the script that he worried about, though. It was his hair. In one scene, his father (played by Arthur Kennedy) had to cut off his long, counterculture hair to conform to military standards. Because the shooting schedule required them to film earlier parts of the movie after that scene was shot, though, Douglas was given a wig that he was pretty convinced would end his career before it started.
“I looked in the mirror and I looked just like Veronica Lake,” he recalled.
There are many people who would pay through the nose to look like Veronica Lake. The 1940s icon who starred in such classics as I Married a Witch, Sullivan’s Travels, and This Gun for Hire had the kind of big-screen beauty that sells tickets just from the poster, but more famously, she had a haircut that sent an untold number of women to the hairdressers with a blank cheque and a single request. Her bleach blonde peek-a-boo hairstyle became all the rage, though the people demanding an identical ‘do were usually of the female persuasion.
To be clear, Douglas looked nothing like Lake in Hail, Hero!, though it’s safe to say that the film would have received much more attention if he had. In the end, neither the script nor his wig derailed his career. Shortly thereafter, he starred in a movie called Summertree in which he played yet another student who drops out of university and struggles with the prospect of going to Vietnam. It was also panned, but at least he didn’t have to wear a wig.
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