Michael Douglas: A Hollywood Antihero’s Bumpy Ride

‘One Helluva Ride’By Michael DouglasGrand Central Publishing, 481 pagesTwo-thirds of the way through his engaging, if inevitably partial, memoir, the actor, producer, and Hollywood legend Michael Douglas offers his perspective on why he had succeeded in a notoriously fickle industry, when discussing his iconic work as reluctant vigilante D-Fens in “Falling Down”: “Here was an anti-movie star role. It was exactly what I was looking for.” Those two lines may be even more revealing than the author of “One Helluva Ride” believes. There was a period in his career, roughly stretching from “Romancing the Stone” in 1984 until “Wonder Boys” in 2000, when Mr. Douglas was perhaps the most interesting A-list actor in the business, mainly because he seemed uninterested in being liked. Repeatedly, he chose difficult, often unpleasant roles that channeled his unique brand of unwholesome charisma. He won an Oscar for his Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street, and became a favorite among financial traders everywhere for his famous “Greed is good!” monologue, which summed up the rapacious, cutthroat approach of the Eighties. He thrived on taking sexually charged parts in talking-point dramas and thrillers which included “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” and “Disclosure,” or being center stage in psychological studies such as “Falling Down” and “The Game.” He could turn on and turn up old-school movie star charisma like few others, as the lead in “The American President,” or serve as a more than capable producer of pictures as eclectic as “Face/Off” or “Flatliners.” The only thing that he seemed flummoxed by, as “Shining Through” and “The Ghost and the Darkness” demonstrated, were period pictures. Mr. Douglas, who recently said he has no intention of returning to appearing in pictures, was an actor who seemed best suited to conducting cold viciousness in Armani threads.Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas on the set of ‘Romancing the Stone.’ Via Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesThis has always made him a fascinating, slightly reptilian presence on screen, and it is notable that, in the latter part of his career, he has pivoted away from these anti-heroic roles towards more straightforwardly sympathetic characters. This began with “Wonder Boys” and then continued over a decade later with his brilliant Liberace in “Behind the Candelabra” — quite possibly his career-best work — followed by everything from the excellent “The Kominsky Method” to a lucrative recurring mentor role in the “Ant-Man” and “Avengers” films as a benevolent scientist. The actor has stories to tell in abundance. Armed with his ghostwriters Shane Salerno and Michael Fleming Jr, he is now prepared to tell them. Advance publicity has, naturally, revolved around the sexual aspects of Mr. Douglas’s past, and the memoir serves up a choice selection of anecdotes. There was constant speculation as to whether he was having an affair with Sharon Stone on the set of “Basic Instinct,” and he writes, almost gleefully, “they were so focused on a possible relationship between Sharon and me, they missed the real relationship happening between me and Jeanne [Tripplehorn].” That picture was a magnet for controversy even back in the early Nineties thanks to its — shall we say — unique presentation of bisexual women as murderous harpies who only flirted with Sapphism to attract men. Now it would be unreleasable, if it was ever made. Mr. Douglas cheerfully writes of a particularly brutal sex scene between his character and Ms. Tripplehorn’s that “These days there are intimacy coordinators whose whole job is to make sure everyone feels comfortable doing scenes like this. Back then we did have some concept of consent, but we did it the old-fashioned way, planning everything out and meticulously rehearsing every movement.” You can almost hear a regretful sigh over how things have changed since his heyday.Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas and Jeanne Tripplehorn at the Cannes Film Festival promoting ‘Basic Instinct’ in May 1992. FocKan/WireImageThe list of celebrity conquests continues. most notably in the form of his “Romancing the Stone” co-star Kathleen Turner, who responded to the disclosures in the memoir with “Good heavens! What a fuss about something 40 years ago!” But by far the most compelling relationship in the book is not between Mr. Douglas and his co-stars, or even his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, but between him and his legendary father Kirk. Michael Douglas is what would be described in today’s parlance as a nepo baby — a term he openly bristles at — but the difficult, at times, violent relationship that Douglas père et fils had is never less than intriguing. On the one hand, Michael praises Kirk as “the most dynamic person I ever met in my entire life”, but on the other, calls him “a flawed man with a ferocious temper and a burning ambition,” and suggests that “the arguments and constant tension had a great impact on me.” Any armchair psychologist can see that the younger Mr. Douglas’s means of escaping from his father’s considerable shadow was to acquire the rights to Kirk’s pet project, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” from him, deny the patriarch the chance to star in it — he was considered too old and Jack Nicholson was cast instead — and end up winning an Oscar for producing it. He may write “One of the hardest moments of my life was firing my father from his dream role”, and it went every bit as badly as he thought it would, with Kirk first flying into a rage and then becoming icily distant. Mr. Douglas neglected to thank him on stage while collecting his Academy Award and ends the chapter by citing his father’s comment in his own memoir that “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I made more money from that film than any I acted in. And I would gladly give back every cent if I could have played that role.” The obvious rejoinder — that surely Nicholson did a far better job than he would have done — goes unspoken. As you would expect in any celebrity memoir, there is the usual roistering and bad behavior, including accounts of cocaine binges with OJ Simpson and furious on-set arguments with directors who did not come up to Mr. Douglas’s exacting standards. Brian De Palma, who tried to get him fired from “Fatal Attraction” when initially hired to direct it before being booted himself, does not come across well, and a screaming row with Paul Verhoeven, whom Mr. Douglas accused of favoring Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” over him, ends when Verhoeven’s nose begins hemorrhaging, so stressful was their altercation. There are some reasonably revealing anecdotes about Hollywood royalty including Julia Roberts and his close friend Danny DeVito.Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones during the F1 Grand Prix of Las Vegas at Las Vegas Strip Circuit on November 21 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Via Arnold Jerocki/Getty ImagesBut it is also a shame that his late-period work, including “The Kominsky Method” — which crowned his third-act return to television after the interesting film roles dried up — is dismissed in a perfunctory epilogue. Mr. Douglas sounds like a CEO delivering his annual presentation to shareholders: “Many of my pictures have an enduring watchability and cultural impact.” Gordon Gekko would cringe at that but he’s not wrong. What makes Michael Douglas so fascinating — rather more so, in fact, than his father — is the strange mixture of patrician confidence and outright danger that he brings to his most compelling roles. This is a quality that he exudes off-screen, too. When Decca Aitkenhead interviewed him recently for the UK Sunday Times in London, she observed that “the end of lunch comes as a relief. It’s been nearly a decade since an interviewee so comprehensively thwarted any glimmer of conversational connection — that was Madonna”, and describes how Mr. Douglas is a reserved, cold character who will not make eye contact, and who sneers “My curiosity is why, of all countries, of all the press that I do, why are the Brits so consumed with the issues of sex?” This from a man who, when Ms. Zeta-Jones asked him to be monogamous or end their relationship, had to make “five quick calls” to other people he was seeing before he could plight his troth. “One Helluva Ride” lives up to its title. It’s a fast, page-turning, and often gasp-inducing read that thankfully eschews the usual “everyone was great and it was a gas to work with them” platitudes in favor of pointed drive-by shootings — of “The Game” he writes, “David [Fincher] has a vision of the movie in his head . . . sometimes I just wished he’d share it with me” — and incisive observations about the changing industry that he bestrode like a now silver-haired Colossus for decades. Yet the abiding interest that it will have for many is the sense that Mr. Douglas, one of the great technical actors in American cinema has, somehow, been doing it all to keep up with dad- a man many would think he long outstripped – all these years. Spartacus, the movie star par excellence, has been defenestrated by D-Fens, the anti-movie star. Sigmund Freud would have a field day.

Michael Douglas: A Hollywood Antihero’s Bumpy Ride

Michael Douglas: A Hollywood Antihero’s Bumpy Ride

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