Michael Douglas dishes on Kirk, Catherine Zeta-Jones and one helluva ride in Morristown

Imagine trying to follow in the sandal prints of Spartacus.

This guy took on the Romans! Michael Douglas reminded a bemused audience Monday at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.

Douglas was referring, of course, to his late father, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas. Now, picture trying to tell your old man he’s too old for the lead role in a film you optioned from him.

When Kirk saw the final cut of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he praised his son — who would win an Oscar as producer — and lauded Jack Nicholson for a great performance. But every three years or so, “after a couple of pops,” the senior Douglas would lean in and, with his gravelly voice, tell his boy: “I could have played that part!”

Michael Douglas’ journey to emerge from his father’s shadow was one of many entertaining threads in the 90-minute talk, presented by the Drew Forum lecture series. Nimbly moderated by Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, it was a promotion for Douglas’ new memoir, aptly titled One Helluva Ride.

Fame and foibles, affairs, substance abuse, cancer, his courtship with the much younger Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, his embrace of Judaism — all were fair game.

Douglas, now 82 and bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father, spoke candidly about their rocky relationship, which he said improved after a helicopter crash (Kirk) and tongue cancer (Michael) made them reassess what’s important in life.

At the height of his fame, Kirk Douglas wasn’t around much for his kids. The pattern repeated with his son, star of TV’s Streets of San Francisco and many films, including Romancing the Stone, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction and most notably, Wall Street.

Michael Douglas won his second Oscar for that 1987 hit — joining Laurence Olivier as the only actors with Academy Awards for producing and acting —  portraying fictional corporate raider Gordon Gekko, whose iconic “greed is good” line captured the era’s zeitgeist.

“My career was so much more important to me than my family,” he admitted.

Mankiewicz asked why Douglas was so good playing “gas-holes” like Gekko and Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction. (Except he didn’t say gas-holes.)

The actor, whose recent roles have included Ben Franklin and a Marvel superhero (Dr. Hank Pym, a.k.a Ant-Man), pushed back. “I would call them morally ambivalent… I thought they were, you know, guys who had sort of ambivalence in terms of making the right choices or not.”

Douglas credited Wall Street director Oliver Stone with pushing him from his comfort zone, goading him to “hate his guts” to get “just that much more nastiness in Gekko.”

Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey — his British mother had family ties to the Johnson & Johnson empire, which happened to have a “castle” she was visiting “when I popped out” — Douglas craved his father’s attention but wanted for little else as a child. He adored his mother, actress Diana (Dill) Douglas, and had a loving stepfather.

In the 1960s, he transitioned from preppy boarding schools to hippie culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where, over his father’s objections, he gravitated to the family business.

“I figured my mom’s an actress. How bad could it be?”

Bad enough, at first, that he vomited from stage fright before performances.

But after bit parts on TV, he hit his stride on the Streets of San Francisco, and found a mentor in co-star Karl Malden — who even gave Douglas his blessing to quit the popular show to produce Cuckoo’s Nest. Ironically, Douglas’ success on TV and as a producer pigeonholed him; studios did not see him as a leading man, even on films he produced.

FAME, FLINGS AND FOIBLES

Only after Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and a few others passed on Romancing the Stone (1984) did Douglas get the part that would make him a movie star.

He also romanced co-star Kathleen Turner, an affair both denied for decades. Douglas was a married dad at the time, though separated from his first wife. Onscreen chemistry doesn’t always combust offset, however.

Annette Bening and Douglas were sizzling in the 1995 romance comedy The American President, yet stayed professional between takes. That’s often sage advice, he said. If actors have an affair and then fight halfway through filming, “it turns into a nightmare,” he said.

As his star was rising in the ’70s and ’80s, so was cocaine. On movie sets, he said, the prop man stashed it in the prop truck. Leaving a hundred bucks in your car signaled to the valet: “Hook me up.”

In 1992, Douglas spent a month in rehab for alcohol and substance abuse.  His half-brother Eric died from an accidental drug overdose, and his son Cameron struggled with heroin and did prison time. They have appeared together in two films, It Runs in the Family (2003, also with Kirk Douglas) and Looking Through Water (2025).

LOVE, LIFE AND SECOND CHANCES

A messy divorce with wife Diandra Luker was finalized in 2000. A decade later, when he was 66, Douglas was diagnosed with stage IV tongue cancer. After intensive chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free in 2011. He said the experience made him fully appreciate his supportive family — which by this time included the one he was raising with Catherine Zeta-Jones, 25 years his junior.

“I fell for her hook, line and sinker,” he said, crediting her with saving his life.

They had met in France at a film festival, he recounted, while he was separated from his wife. Entranced, he was emboldened by an interview in which the actress said she liked older men. Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas were going to dinner with Zeta-Jones and invited Douglas to join them.

Later, Zeta-Jones met him at a hotel bar, where he had too much to drink. “I’m going to be the father of your children,” he informed her. A bouquet of roses and a note of apology the next day rescued him. They courted for about a year and a half, though at every date “her brother would always show up.”

Finally, when they discussed getting serious, Zeta-Jones laid down the law about monogamy.

“And I say, ‘You’re absolutely right. And I have five calls to make,'” Douglas recounted, to gales of laughter in the theater.

The Oscar winning couple married in 2000 and have remained together except for a rough patch in 2013, when Zeta-Jones also confronted health problems and an interview in which Douglas suggested oral sex caused his cancer.

Although Douglas is a longtime activist for gun control and nuclear nonproliferation, the only vaguely political commentary of the evening came when Mankiewicz inquired about his Jewish faith.

Douglas said his mother belonged to the Church of England and a cousin is a bishop in Bermuda. But his father embraced his Jewish heritage later in life, and so has he.

“I’m not a religious person. But I love the tribe,” he said, noting his financial support for Israel over the years.

While declining to publicly take sides in the contentious Israeli election, he expressed concerns about rising antisemitism and “overuse” of the word genocide.

“It should be taken off the table. And then we can maybe try to have some other discussions,” Douglas said.

This season’s Drew Forum series kicked off in September featuring Knicks broadcasters Walt Frazier and Mike Breen. It continues on March 15, 2027, with sports talk luminaries Mike Francesa and Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo, and concludes on April 27 with New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens and Times journalist and bestselling author Frank Bruni.