Michael Douglas Biography

 Michael Douglas

                                                                       

Michael Douglas, (born September 25, 1944, New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.), American film actor and producer who is best known for his intense portrayals of flawed heroes.

Early life and career

                                                               

Douglas, the son of film legend Kirk Douglas and British actress Diana Dill, received much of his education in filmmaking by accompanying his father to various film locations. After studying drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara (B.A., 1968), Douglas made his screen debut in Hail, Hero! (1969), a Vietnam-era antiwar film now regarded as hyperbolic and dated. He made a handful of mostly forgettable films—the best of which was the Disney-produced family adventure Napoleon and Samantha (1972)—before landing the role of Steve Keller on the popular television series The Streets of San Francisco (1972), costarring with veteran actor Karl Malden. 

Noteworthy acting roles

                                                                                                                                                                                        

                                                       

Douglas coproduced and costarred in The China Syndrome (1979), a taut thriller set in a nuclear power plant that was ironically and fortuitously released the same week as the real-life nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island. He appeared with Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito in the highly successful action-adventure Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (1985), and again teamed with the same costars for the popular dark comedy The War of the Roses (1989). One of Douglas’s most memorable roles was in Fatal Attraction (1987), in which he portrayed a family man terrorized by a woman (memorably portrayed by Glenn Close) with whom he has an adulterous affair. In the same year, Douglas delivered an Oscar-winning performance as a ruthless, morally empty financier in Wall Street (1987). Douglas’s screen persona was well showcased in this film, in that his antiheroic character of Gordon Gekko—whose personal credo is “greed is good”—is both unctuous and charismatic. Several of Douglas’s performances flaunt this dichotomy: his villainous characters exhibit personal magnetism, and his heroes are often victim to their own inadequacies. He (like his father) was one of the few actors to build a successful career out of portraying less-than-virtuous characters.

Later films

                                                                   

In 2000 Douglas received widespread praise for his performances as a depressive college professor in Wonder Boys and as the recently appointed American drug czar in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic; he costarred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the latter film, and the couple married that same year. Douglas starred alongside his father, Kirk, and his son, Cameron, in It Runs in the Family (2003), about three generations of a dysfunctional Manhattan family. He later played a secret service agent wrongly accused of being part of an assassination attempt in The Sentinel (2006), and in King of California (2007) he portrayed a patient recently released from a mental hospital who is looking for gold underneath a discount store.

Personal life

                                                             

In 2010 Douglas announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced throat cancer; the following year he announced that the disease was in remission. He revealed in 2013 that he had actually been suffering from tongue cancer but had misrepresented his condition because it was known that the surgical treatment of tongue cancer was sometimes disfiguring. He had worried that public knowledge of that possibility would affect his career prospects. He was ultimately treated with chemotherapy and radiation rather than surgery.

Comedies and later work

Robert De Niro in Wag the Dog

Robert De Niro in Wag the Dog (1997). 

                       

De Niro later appeared in Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat (1995), which pitted him against actor Al Pacino. He continued to explore his comedic side in such films as the satirical Wag the Dog (1997); Analyze This (1999) and its sequel, Analyze That (2002); and Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequels, Meet the Fockers (2004) and Little Fockers (2010). In 2008 De Niro reteamed with Pacino in the police    drama Righteous Kill, and the following year he starred in Everybody’s Fine, portraying a widower who discovers various truths about his adult children. He later took supporting roles in the thrillers Machete (2010) and Limitless (2011), the action drama Killer Elite (2011), and the ensemble romantic comedy New Year’s Eve (2011).

Directing and awards

                                                                             

In addition to acting, De Niro also directed several films. In 1993 he made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale, a movie about the Mafia set in the 1960s. He later directed the highly acclaimed The Good Shepherd (2006), which centres on the origins of the CIA and the compromises made by an agent over the span of his career.

In 2009 De Niro was named a Kennedy Center honoree, and two years later he received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement). In 2016 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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