Michael Douglas creates real men. Flawed. Good. Human. Conflicted. Passionate. Smart, decent men who occasionally have moral lapses. And immoral men who are dazzlingly desirable. As an actor his choices reflect a fearlessness in the face of a public who constantly wants to identify and define its icons by the characters that they portray on film. He's a leading man who doesn't always want to do what the traditional leading man is supposed to do. And he is one of the few men, in any age category, who consistently weaves raw and blatant sexuality into the threads of incredibly charismatic characters.


Michael Douglas eschews the typecasting trap partly because of his own journey as an artist, and partly because the public is willing to continue to go see his movies, regardless of the genre.

"I create challenges by the roles I take," he says. "I'm sort of proud of the fact that I'm not really typecast. People are always trying to get a handle on what you do. With me either it's my sex trilogy--Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure--or my businessman trilogy--Wall Street, The Game and this picture I'm doing now called A Perfect Murder. I've been fortunate that, within those categories, [I've been able] to choose different types of roles, and I am proud that the audience has been able to accept me in whatever type of role I play. They are not the typical 'movie star' roles. They're more ambivalent characters. Sometimes they are morally depraved. They are not the outright positive type of images that you attribute to selecting a 'star' type role.

"And the pictures themselves are more oddball,"

Michael Douglas adds.

"I've been very fortunate in that area, too. I've taken chances and so far the audiences have basically condoned those choices. They have allowed me to do those different types of roles. I do pictures for myself, because I figure if I like them, some other crazy people out there might like them, too. You know, once you've gained your confidence and done some bizarre, strange films with some roles that have been successful, it gives you the confidence to go out there and take more chances."

Two hammocks, four palm trees and twilight on the magical island of Bermuda. The cigars are lit, the Black Seal Bermuda rum poured--a feat not easily accomplished on this windy evening. But we are, after all, in paradise. Michael Douglas's paradise: the Ariel Sands Beach Club, to be precise. Amid the coral-painted cottage colony that he has recently invested in (owned by members of his mother's family), on the idyllic beaches where he happily played as a boy, and near the golf courses that he cannot get nearly enough of as a man, Michael Douglas is literally and figuratively at home.

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Dressed in neatly pressed khakis and a cozy cashmere sweater, he looks much younger than his 53 years. Of course, there's his father Kirk's cleft chin to consider, as well as the sparkling aquamarine eyes of his mother, actress Diana Dill. Settling back into a hammock with an El Rey del Mundo, Michael Douglas is your basic brilliant, successful, hard-working, recently divorced guy who just happens to be an Academy Award-winning actor and producer. He's a celebrity who dearly wishes he had more time to escape to the golf course and play hooky with his buddies. And, not unlike many men who have encountered a mid-life transition, he wonders what he is going to do to imbue the second half of his life with meaning, now that his marriage has ended and his child is in college.


His career as an actor has been driven by a series of passionate, if seemingly quirky, choices. In a way, Michael Douglas has helped reshape our definition of what a leading man is supposed to be. Very few movie stars will allow themselves the creative latitude to craft morally ambiguous or flawed characters on a regular basis. The Hero is supposed to save the day. The country. The planet. Our celluloid heroes need to be better than good. If If a movie star can't use his mind or his body or his spirit to vanquish all foes in 120 minutes or less while still looking great, that movie just isn't a star vehicle.


Michael Douglas's body of work shows that he has built a successful career around a collection of risky characters, some of whom were downright unappealing. Even when he was portraying the romantic hero Jack Colton in the 1984 hit Romancing the Stone and its sequel, Jewel of the Nile, he did so with a self-deprecating, recalcitrant smirk. It was almost as if he had to constantly argue with himself to make the correct heroic moves.


His Academy Award-winning performance in Oliver Stone's 1987 hit Wall Street showed a seductive, arrogant Gordon Gecko, a devil in a custom-made suit whose amorality spoke to that part within each of us that secretly resonates with his ice-cold, bottom-line heart. That same year he played the husband who succumbs to a steamy, adulterous affair with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Six years later, he was the victim of sexual harassment at the hands of Demi Moore in Disclosure.


We were saddened when we realized that there was most definitely an ice pick somewhere in detective Nick Curran's future in Basic Instinct. Falling Down cast Douglas as a disenfranchised, downsized defense department worker avenging the wrongs of the world during a day-long gun-toting rampage across Los Angeles. He played The Game as successful investment banker Nicholas Van Orton, who had to lose everything he thought he had before he could find his way back to his own heart and avoid committing suicide like his father. Even in Rob Reiner's romantic comedy, The American President, Douglas created a man who could run our country, romance a woman and conduct a sexual relationship in the White House. Of course, President Andrew Shepherd was a widower.


As the light of the day slowly begins to fade, Douglas takes a puff on his El Rey del Mundo and muses metaphorically about how he decides which film he wants to work on.

"Choosing which movie to do is a lot like falling in love with a woman,"

he says, the twinkle in his eyes attempting to disguise just how seriously he takes this process.

"I don't know how well you analyze what qualities of a woman you are looking for, as opposed to what hits you in the face. You are attracted to her, you are attracted to a project. You then, because you are a little older now, don't impulsively go out and get married, i.e., commit to a project, but you find out about it. How many times do you find yourself thinking about it? Do you have to have a paper and pen by your bed at night? Do you wake up thinking about her, about the project? And if she stays with you, that project, and you can't get enough of her, you're hooked and you know you gotta do it. You gotta go and make that movie. If the initial infatuation wavers and wanders, you know that you don't want to make that commitment."

He takes another puff on his cigar.

"Sometimes you want to do the dance a little bit. The director is of utmost importance. There are only about eight directors that I would walk off the boardwalk to make a picture with. So, short of those directors that I would sign off on immediately based on their résumé, I want to talk to the director. I want to be sure that they have a vision, that they actually have a picture in their mind of this movie, how they want to do it--even if it is different from what I saw when I read the script. It's important to see just how clear and strong their vision is."

Pausing for a moment and exhaling smoke, he adds wryly,

"Although it is possible to have love at first sight. I have learned that, professionally at least, I have pretty good instincts."

The eldest son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill Darrid grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, away from the glare of Hollywood. His desire to become an actor surfaced at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as far as a young man could get from the rigidity of his New England prep schools.

"I went to Choate, which was this very fancy prep school. For a while I was debating about going to Yale. Going to California to go to college at UC Santa Barbara was the first real decision in my life. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was a real tight-ass and I figured I had to change, so I made the most radical change I could think of. I went to my college adviser and then to a travel agent and I looked at all these brochures and said, 'I want to go there.'

"It was great to be in California in the early 1960s. The UC system was in fabulous shape. The whole culture was just spectacular. It was an important time in my life and I think it paid off pretty well. I was undeclared for years and years and then in my junior year they called me and said, 'You gotta get a major.' I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was a hippie and I was hanging out. I had flunked out for a year already and I was enjoying myself. So I thought, I'll take theater. I figured, Mom was an actress in the theater and my stepfather was a Broadway producer before he was a writer and it just seemed like it was an opportunity to do something that would be easy. I thought, my dad's an actor, but I had this terrible stage fright. So after majoring in theater, I worked as an assistant film editor on my dad's film, Lonely Are the Brave. I worked as an assistant director on The Heroes of Telemark and Cast a Giant Shadow."


After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1968, Michael Douglas moved to New York City to continue his dramatic training, first with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse and eventually with Wynn Handman at the American Place Theater. "I did a lot of Off-Broadway work and summer stock and eventually I was put under contract to CBS. I did three pictures for CBS Playhouse that did not work out particularly well, but it did bring me out to Los Angeles. I did a few episodes of 'Medical Center,' 'The FBI' and the like, and then the series ["The Streets of San Francisco"] came. And it was a really, really phenomenal opportunity."


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