Michael Douglas receives the Palme d'Honneur in Cannes for a career dedicated to acting in historic roles such as 'Basic Instinct' and 'Wall Street
Cinema and literature have told us about the great dramas and tragedies of families with power, success, and money. Castrating parents with their children, rebellious and rebellious children, and family traumas that have to do with the ego and family bonding. None of that happened between Michael Douglas and Kirk Douglas, at least that's what the actor makes clear.
"I would be very proud of this," said the actor in a meeting with the press within the framework of the contest.
Son of a classic movie star, they called him the son of Spartacus, because of the character that his father played and because of the role he played in the Hollywood of blacklists and McCarthyism. Douglas complains, yes, of not having seen his father much in his childhood. Always filming, absorbed by work, a mistake that the prodigal son made again.
That is precisely the documentary that is presented in Cannes and that accompanies the honorary award that it receives here in the French contest. "Seeing those scenes in the big palace, on a huge screen...it was a bit overwhelming for a lot of people. We had a very quiet dinner afterward, everyone was sort of digesting it," he said, referring to a fantastic video the festival had put together. and that showed a summary of the best of his career.
"There are festivals and then there is Cannes," said the actor who recognized that the parties here are very good. In any case, Cannes was a very special festival for him. He first came up with The China Syndrome, then in 1992 he pres, ented Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct. Also with A day of fury, he set foot on the French Riviera.
He was president of the jury, awarding Kurosawa and Bob Fosse jointly, and returned with Behind the Candelabra, a film for HBO directed by Steven Soderbergh and in which Douglas played the legendary gay pianist Liberace. The actor was excited at the press conference, as it was his first public appearance and his first job after overcoming throat cancer. "They waited for me to shoot this movie for me to be cured of cancer," he said in front of the director and Matt Damon, the actor who played his young lover.
He had already worked with Soderbergh on Traffic, an important film for the actor because it allowed him to fight drug trafficking from his position as a world star,, in addition, he met Catherine Zeta-Jones, his second wife, and mother of two of his sons. he. Drugs have been an important issue in his life, the only one he avoids talking about. Already in college, his father tried to keep him away from them. Later, at the height of his career, he also needed to detox. Traffic launched political activism against them.
Before it came to all of this, Michael Douglas had an unusual career. The son of a Hollywood star and a stage actress, he was the world he knew. He went to college in California, became a hippie, fought the Vietnam War, and joined the theater. He tells that his first role as an actor was a political performance, going from class to class and pretending that he was attacked like the Vietnamese by the American army. He did a lot of theater and his father tried to go see him. Once, Kirk Douglas told him that he sucked. Something that the son fondly remembers. "It was true, I did a bad monologue in Much Ado About Nothing."
His father gave him a job in one of the shootings in which he was involved and he discovered a taste for cinema. As an actor, he debuted on television and later became a producer. He won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then went on to produce a much more political story with Jane Fonda, The China Syndrome. The film sparked protests from the nuclear power lobby.
He was the protagonist of two romantic comedies that he also produced, Behind the Green Heart, and The Jewel of the Nile. Then came the role of his life, that of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a film by Oliver Stone that questioned the savage neoliberalism of the era. Reagan. “At that time I did not realize the importance of that film.
It was a phenomenon, on the street, many told me that they had started a business thanks to me, ”he recounts in the documentary. With that role, he won an Oscar as an actor. “The Oscar meant that I had stepped out of my father's shadow. It was also the recognition of my colleagues”. Comrades, to whom he wanted to address, above all to the American scriptwriters, now on strike, an issue that he hopes will be resolved soon. "It is a legitimate claim for having been collecting minimum wages," he said.
However, in addition to the awards, the character of Gekko opened up the possibility for him to play malicious characters, who cross the line that separates good and evil. "Acting is lying," the actor makes clear. That's when that kind of interpretive trilogy of sexually disturbed guys came along, who turned him into a sex symbol. Fatal Attraction with Glenn Close was the first. The second, is Basic Instinct, with Sharon Stone. The third, Harassment, with Demi Moore.
A Day Fury, Black Rain, The Game, War of the Roses, and A chorus line... are other outstanding titles from his filmography. In recent years, Douglas says that what he has been looking for were things he had never done before, movies to learn from. He had never filmed with green cloth and, therefore, he launched himself in Antman, a superhero movie. "You feel like a complete idiot and then you see it and you're like wow that's fantastic!" he recounted. He had never done comedy and that is why he said yes to the Netflix series, The Kominsky Method, in which he plays a retired actor who teaches young people. The latest project he has underway is also something he's never done before a period film. This is Franklin, an Apple miniseries that took him to shoot in France to get into the shoes of the American founding father Benjamin Franklin.
