The movies that sent Michael Douglas into Hollywood exile: “Seemed like a good time to go away”
As the son of two actors, Michael Douglas was always destined to follow in their footsteps. He also happened to bear a striking resemblance to his father, which he didn’t always see as a good thing.
The typical trajectory towards stardom is for a performer to work their way up the ladder gradually, and if they’re good enough, they’ll reach the absolute pinnacle of the industry by claiming an Academy Award. However, Douglas went about it the opposite way.
He claimed his first Oscar for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which drove a wedge between the two generations of the Douglas clan after Kirk had originated the role of Randall P McMurphy on Broadway, purchased the rights to the novel, and spent years trying to make the movie with himself in the role that landed Jack Nicholson his first ‘Best Actor’ prize.
Douglas had only played five credited roles in feature films, but he was already an Oscar winner, which created immense pressure. Not only did he have one of the industry’s most prestigious trophies in his back pocket in his early 30s, but he also faced the equally difficult challenge of stepping out of his father’s shadow and becoming his own man.
Of course, he managed it comfortably, but it took a while. It wasn’t until Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 adventure Romancing the Stone that Douglas became a movie star, and three years after that, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street won him a second Oscar, this time for his efforts in front of the camera.
He’s been a fixture of film and television for half a century, and part of that longevity is down to his status as a savvy operator. Douglas knows how to navigate a tricky place like Hollywood, and he realised that after a couple of back-to-back bombs, it was better if audiences didn’t see him for a while.
2003’s It Runs in the Family existed somewhere between stunt casting and blatant nepotism, with Douglas producing a picture in which his real-life parents and son starred as his character’s fictional counterparts. The very next month, the turgid action comedy The In-Laws was released, and it was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office.
“After It Runs in the Family and The In-Laws, which I thought was a funny picture but was a disaster because it was released badly,” he told Eye for Film. “People thought it seemed like a good time to go away and hide.” That’s exactly what he did, with the actor taking his longest-ever onscreen sabbatical.
Ironically, he won a Golden Globe for his performance as Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, which premiered on HBO three days after The In-Laws arrived in theatres. However, in terms of cinema, making two panned movies back to back sent Douglas into exile until he returned 35 months later with the political action thriller The Sentinel.
