Michael Douglas names the lowest point of his acting career: “Boy, was it a lesson”
The term ‘nepo baby’ didn’t even exist when Michael Douglas began his career in the 1960s, which was definitely for the best when the actor knew he had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously as his own man.
It was definitely beneficial in a certain respect to have the legendary Kirk Douglas as his father, but the obvious drawback was that until the second generation of the aspiring dynasty was capable of standing on his own two feet, the ‘Golden Age’ icon would always be a shadow that loomed larger than the rest.
Even though he won an Academy Award less than a decade after his screen debut when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest scooped ‘Best Picture’, it was hardly a Kirk-free victory when he was the first actor to play Randall P McMurphy on Broadway, and he was also the one who initially purchased the film rights.
It wouldn’t be until the late 1980s when the box office success of Fatal Attraction and his ‘Best Actor’ win for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street allowed Douglas to finally believe that he’d distanced himself far enough away from his father to be taken seriously as his own entity, and there were inevitably some knocks taken along the way.
In what was only his fifth credited role and the first time he’d been involved in a feature in any capacity since winning an Oscar, Douglas played a doctor in a 1978 mystery thriller based on a novel by Robin Cook, which itself had been written for the screen and directed by a bestselling author and filmmaker.
“One of my earliest movies was a movie called Coma, directed by Michael Crichton, a well-known writer and director,” he explained to Film Scouts. “In that movie, I was playing a doctor. I had a two-page monologue I had to do. I developed some sloppy habits from TV. The speech had a couple of medical terms that I did not manage to get right.”
Douglas tried to navigate the verbose dialogue the best he could, but Crichton wouldn’t accept the scene as being in the can until it was pulled off to his satisfaction. He did get there in the end, but it took a David Fincher-like number of takes before the director was satisfied, matters that weren’t helped by Crichton’s status as a graduate of Harvard Medical School.
“So, I did the shot 68 times,” he reminisced. “You have to realise that Crichton was a doctor. I was on my knees! I couldn’t even remember my name after the 25th time. It was the low point of my career, but boy, was it a lesson in remembering words.”
Dozens of takes later, and Douglas had at long last pulled off Coma‘s eloquent monologue, and the experience was traumatising enough that he vowed never again to be caught unprepared for such lengthy soliloquies.
