Michael Douglas

In his memoir One Hell of a Ride, Michael Douglas tells his life story through twelve of his films. The book traces how his work and private life collided—from growing up in the shadow of his legendary father Kirk Douglas, to producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a young man with no track record, to playing men undone by desire and ambition in Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, to navigating his own addiction, a stage four cancer diagnosis, and his son Cameron's incarceration. In this conversation with Tanya Mosley, Douglas explains the mechanisms behind those collisions and what he learned from them.

The weight of a father's shadow

Douglas describes his father Kirk as "overwhelming"—a man of "energy, physical strength, tenacity" who seemed "impossible to match." Making five or six movies a year, Kirk was consumed by guilt after divorcing Michael's mother when Michael was five. When his sons visited from the East Coast, the pressure of his guilt made him intense and awkward. "He would hit us," Douglas says flatly. "Corporal punishment." The result was a childhood of admiration mixed with fear.