Being Late Bloomer Didn’t Hurt Michael Douglas

What if Michael Douglas had refused to be a chip off the old block? The son of superstar Kirk Douglas is one of the savviest actors-producers in Hollywood, and he almost missed out. He was too busy goofing off.

“Dad was the first one to say, ‘I’ll tell you quite honestly, the last one I thought would succeed is you. You were a hippie, had no drive, had no motivation and who would’ve thought you’d be doing all these things.”’

“All these things,” of course, include winning a slew of Academy Awards for his first production, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” acing his second production, “The China Syndrome” and slipping back into acting as though it were an old robe as he does in the current, “The Ghost and the Darkness.”

Reared far from the madding crowd in Connecticut by his mother, Diana Dill, and stepfather, Douglas scrutinized both faces of fame.

“I grew up and saw the insecurities of my father or mother (and) major movie stars who were over for dinner on a Saturday night,” he says.

“I saw them as real people, not the images that the public deals with. It helped me treat this craft-slash-business more as a way of life and be more reality-based. And it didn’t let me get so abused by all the stuff that goes around you.” (He also attended a private school in the East, wore natty wool jackets and ties and learned the rules.)

He learned them enough to want to break them. And when he attended college in the idyllic West Coast town of Santa Barbara, that patina of Eastern culture blew right off.

“I got called into the university vice chancellor’s office. They said, ‘Michael, you’re a junior in college and you’re still undeclared. You’ve got to get a major. You want a B.A. in what? You can’t keep taking general education courses.’ I mumbled, ‘Er, ah, theater.’ I thought, ‘Oh, this’ll be easy, I must know something about this.”’

Actually, he had no interest in the theater or film. “It was probably a response or reaction to my father,” he shrugged.

“Also, was I gonna take on this challenge? My dad’s a big movie star, Spartacus, y’know?”

He tried it anyway. In spite of agonizing stage fright (he’d vomit in a wastebasket before he went on) Douglas decided he might be pretty good at this, after all.

“I was a late bloomer,” he says. “I was 21 before I ever acted.”

Late bloomer or not, Douglas cannily knows how to pick his projects. The secret, he says, is choosing the movie and not the part.

That may be true, but Douglas proved infallible in juicy parts like the errant husband in “Fatal Attraction,” the fearless daredevil in “Romancing the Stone” and the Machiavellian financier in “Wall Street.” (That fascinatingly sinister role earned him the Oscar as best actor.)

“That was a big moment for me. It was a confirmation as a second-generation actor because it was an award presented by my peers. Obviously, there’s a lot of jealousy or aspects when your father’s a movie star and it meant a lot to me to get a nomination from my acting cohorts. It was a confirmation about who I was as an actor, which I needed. It was important to me at that time.”

Douglas creates charming rogues, capable American presidents and flamboyant adventurers. But he also portrays characters that aren’t so nice, like Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street.”

Many popular actors are reluctant to sully their images with unsympathetic portraits like that. Not Douglas.

“I like the risk element,” he says. “It’s exciting, like climbing a mountain. It’s part of the adrenalin that charges you. I like to chance the danger of picking an ambivalent character who you might not like on the surface, yet trusting the movie and believing enough in the story and movie that it’s going to work.”

In spite of his grubby sharpshooter in “The Ghost and the Darkness” and his suave chief executive in “The American President,” the last two years have been very tough for the resilient Douglas.

“Starting with my 50th birthday,” he cradles his forehead in his hands, “I had a personal assistant for 17 years who died of a heart attack on my birthday. Then my agent left to become president of MCA. Then Diandra (his wife) and I got separated. My father had a stroke. My mother got cancer. There’s been a sequence the last couple of years that, hopefully, that’s been the toughest.”

He doesn’t know what will become of his marriage.

“We separated a year ago June,” he says. “It’s very amicable, very close, a lot of love. A lot of years are involved.

“I really don’t know exactly what’s in the future - reconciliation or divorce,” he says.

“Hopefully, in either case, the two of us have a better understanding of each other, and if we get together, we’ll not repeat the same mistakes. And if we have other people in our lives we’ll have, hopefully, a better understanding about what went wrong. It is hard.”