The Michael Douglas Fan Page: ARTICLES

Play a Bad Guy? He's Game.
BY DOUGLAS J. ROWE
Associated Press
September 15, 1997

NEW YORK -- Michael Douglas sees his latest movie as "a Scrooge parable" in which he plays a self-involved, coldhearted, bah-humbug type, a man who lacks spirituality and love.

Yep, once again it's "no more Mr. Nice Guy" for the actor who won an Academy Award for personifying 1980s greed in "Wall Street," battled his wife to the death in "The War of the Roses," and endangered his family by cheating on his spouse with a psycho in "Fatal Attraction."

"Playing victims is not a lot of fun," he says, explaining his affinity for the flawed, even venal, characters for which he's most famous.

In "The Game," which opened Friday, he's a multimillionaire businessman with a control-freak streak as wide as a paint-roller. For his 48th birthday, he gets a "gift" that strips him of his sense of power and privilege.

Douglas, who turns 53 on Sept. 25, says that unlike his father Kirk's era, when heroes and villains were neatly delineated, we're in a time of gray areas in which no one's completely a saint or sinner. So he gloms onto stories about people for whom "each day we wake up is a struggle to behave in a ...decent way. And I like that."

He attributes his willingness to play unlikable characters to his "risk-taking" inclinations and his "insane confidence or belief that you can do that" because the audience knows you are likable.

And at this point in his career, he feels that audiences accept him in different kinds of roles and don't pigeonhole him in any "persona."

"When people come to me, they say, 'When I see your name, I don't know what kind of picture it's going to be, but I know it's going to be a good picture.' "

And as often as not, it's going to titillate, infuriate -- and instigate a buzz.

Single women wanted to boil somebody -- if not a bunny -- for the depiction of the desperate woman with whom he has an affair in "Fatal Attraction," homosexuals were angered by the lesbian link to murder in "Basic Instinct" and many P.C. sensibilities were offended by the role reversal in "Disclosure," in which a woman sexually harasses a man on the job. Some even saw his Great White Nerd in "Falling Down" as an apologia for bigotry.

His penchant for making timely and politically or emotionally charged films goes back to "The China Syndrome," a 1979 movie about a nuclear plant accident which he produced and costarred in with Jane Fonda. Two weeks after the film opened, the nation's worst nuclear plant accident occurred at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa.

"I read a lot of newspapers. I like to feel that I'm pretty informed about current events, or the character of our society," he says, denying any rarefied isolation of a big movie star.

"I don't feel that different from other people. And now with my success, it's given me the confidence that if I see something that's pretty weird as a script but it really intrigues me, then I'm haunted by it," he says.

Some scripts he likens to a fast-food meal. "You've eaten it; it just fills you up, and life goes on. Other times, you can remember certain meals you've had and talk about them afterwards," he says.

Douglas says he concerns himself with the quality of the movie first, then his part -- thinking that stems from his experience and success as a producer.

The first feature film he produced (with Saul Zaentz) won five Oscars, including best movie -- 1975's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Since then he's produced "Romancing the Stone," "Starman," "The Jewel of the Nile," and this summer's hit "Face/Off," directed by John Woo.

"Some actors really just look for their part, and turn the pages (to the script) and see how their part is," Douglas says.

"I like movies. I want to be in a good movie. A good movie is more important than a good role. For an actor, a role has to serve the function of the movie. There has to be a purpose for that role to make the movie work.

"So I try to see what my responsibility is to the movie, because if the movie works then we all benefit. Good movies have a way of making everybody look good. Sometimes you get singled out in a bad movie -- you know, a good performance -- but generally a bad movie pulls everybody's work down."

Born in New Brunswick, N.J., Douglas was the eldest of two boys from his father's first marriage. His parents moved to Hollywood to pursue acting careers. But while his father's took off, his mother's didn't, and they divorced in 1950. Douglas and his brother moved back East, where their mother remarried.

An admittedly indifferent student, he attended various schools before completing his secondary education at the elite New England prep school Choate. Although he was accepted at Yale University, he chose to attend the University of California, Santa Barbara. He flunked out his freshman year, then knocked around for 18 months before returning to the school and majoring in drama, getting his degree in 1968.

The earliest memory most people have of him probably comes from "The Streets of San Francisco," the mid-1970s ABC series with Karl Malden.

Before that, Douglas specialized in playing "sensitive young man roles," as he puts it -- a move calculated to differentiate himself from his father, who typically played dynamic types.

Coincidentally, as he looked back at his father's career, his dad's first roles were sensitive young man parts, too -- until Kirk Douglas broke through as an amoral boxer in 1949's "Champion" and went on to star in some edgy roles himself.

Michael Douglas, while maintaining that being a second-generation star has its drawbacks as well as advantages, warmly talks about his father and sounds glad to be a chip off the old block -- and a complementary imprint in cement.

He put his hand- and footprints at Mann's Chinese Theater on Wednesday, making Kirk and Michael Douglas the first father-and-son to have their imprints there. (Note: Check out new pics of this in the photo gallery).

"I think it means something," Douglas says, adding that his own teen-age son helps him understand what it means. "It's a sense of immortality, continuity of generations, of your life going on, and seeing it through your son."

It's also heartwarming for Douglas, who has endured what he considers "a rough three years." It started when he turned 50, losing his personal assistant of nearly 20 years to a heart attack; having his agent leave to run Universal; and enduring both his father's and mother's health problems, his half-brother's high-profile run-ins with drugs and the law, and his own divorce after nearly 20 years of marriage.

Amid all that, Douglas says, it felt nice to immerse himself in his work: "It's a great release and escape valve."

Šcopyright 1997 Detroit Free Press.

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