(Credit: David Shankbone)
Fri 24 October 2025 21:15, UK
Being a ‘nepo baby’ isn’t always straightforward, as simply being born the son or daughter of someone famous can be a blessing and a curse, often resulting in opportunities well-taken and other times completely squandered.
One man you could never level the latter accusation at, though, is Michael Douglas, son of the great Kirk, but a superb actor in his own right.
Given his dad’s historic achievements in cinema in the likes of Spartacus and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, it probably wasn’t a shock that his son gave following in his footsteps a good go, and the younger Douglas studied acting in California before unsurprisingly not finding it too difficult to land a few parts on television in the late 1960s.
Then, a very early film role in a movie called Hail, Hero! about a Vietnam draft dodger brought him a Golden Globe nomination, and later that year, he formed an independent production company. Two years later, when his father gifted him the rights to a Ken Kesey novel called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he produced it as the Jack Nicholson starrer that would go on to sweep the Oscars in 1976, with Douglas picking up the award for ‘Best Picture’.
But that success didn’t necessarily translate into a glamorous acting career for him, and last year at the Red Sea Film Festival, he looked back at the period with no little remorse, noting, “Careful what you wish for. I had a big production company. I financed my own movies. The producing aspect of my life sort of took over, and I would find myself in movies I was producing, and that is not a good combination.”
Douglas took something of a background role for almost ten years, although he did star with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon on The China Syndrome in 1979, a movie about safety failings at a nuclear reactor that proved incredibly prescient when just ten days after its release, there was an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in the US.
The dual roles of acting and producing were proving difficult for him, who recalled: “I would finish acting and then there would be a pile of crap, scripts that we were developing that I would then have to go through, making all my notes for them and all of that. So, the job became overwhelming. There were about 20 years in there which I could have simplified and probably enjoyed life more.”
Nevertheless, in 1984 his actor/producer gamble paid off in spades when he starred in Romancing the Stone, an adventure movie directed by Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis that proved hugely successful and spawned a sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, the following year. He then moved into a period where he was one of the most prominent lead actors in the business with a string of big box office hits including bunny boiler classic Fatal Attraction, the ‘greed is good’ drama Wall Street, for which he won his second Oscar, and then in 1992, the erotic thriller Basic Instinct with Sharon Stone.
Perhaps his greatest performance came in 1993’s Falling Down, the story of a man at his wits’ end with the world around him, who simply gets out of his car while sitting in the suffocating Los Angeles heat and goes on the rampage, raging at what he perceives are the injustices of the economy and human nature. Although it was originally criticised for the violence on display, it has since found cult status, and it also features a great performance from Robert Duvall as the detective trying to make it through his last day before retirement.
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