The “eureka moment” that changed Michael Douglas’ career
Actor Michael Douglas had the combined fortune and displeasure of having parents, Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, who were already famous stars. As such, he naturally had something of a leg up into the film industry but also felt he would forever live in the shadows of those who made him.
Still, despite the pressures, Douglas made significant contributions to the movie industry, producing Miloš Forman’s film version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and starring in the likes of Wall Street, for which he won the ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.
Interestingly, though, Douglas hadn’t always intended to be an actor but rather just fell into the profession when he had no idea what to do, as so many often do, whilst studying at college. In an interview with Contact Music, he explained, “My junior year in college, they said, ‘You have to declare a major, you can’t keep taking general education courses.’ So I said, ‘I guess I’ll take theatre. My mother’s an actress, my father [is an actor].’”
Douglas expressed that he was “the worst actor you’d ever seen” when he first started out and that he had to have a bin offstage so he could be sick in it from nerves and fear. A remedy for his nerves came early on and saw Douglas briefly turn to method acting, a foray that came to be a big moment in his future career.
That’s not to say that Douglas would indeed become a method actor because he wouldn’t, but rather that it showed him the nature of “lying to the camera”. He explained to Vulture: “Someone made the mistake of telling me that the camera can always tell when you’re lying, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ So I turned into a method actor for a while, and then one day, I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I lie every day, and there’s no thunder or lightning coming down and striking me. Acting is about lying. That’s all acting is.’ And that eureka moment changed things around a lot for me.”
Eventually, things started to stick for Douglas, and he emerged as a fine talent, even if his father, Kirk Douglas, didn’t necessarily agree. In fact, Douglas Sr told his son that he couldn’t act, something that Douglas Jnr more or less agreed with, at least when it came to those early college performances.
Finally, though, after a few painstaking decades in the profession, the 1980s arrived, and Douglas starred in the likes of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street. It was those particular films that made Douglas realise that he wasn’t half bad and that likely his father would agree that he’d grown as a performative artist.
He told Rolling Stone: “So it was the commercial success of Fatal Attraction that gave me the confirmation that, ‘Ok, you’re there now.’ I think when you come from the second generation, and you don’t have that rags-to-riches story, your arc is a little smaller. It takes longer to figure out who you are. The assumption is that everything is laid out for you.”
