Michael Douglas is opening up about a painful side of his childhood that he says he could not bring himself to publicly discuss while his famous father, Kirk Douglas, was still alive.
The 82-year-old Oscar winner reveals in his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, that his complicated relationship with the Spartacus legend included physical punishment that continued to affect him long after childhood.
When asked whether he could have written such a revealing book before Kirk died, Michael’s answer was straightforward.
“No,” he told the Associated Press.
Michael explained that he had been deeply uncomfortable discussing his early years and what he described as physical abuse from his father.
“He was of a generation that hit; my mother used the hairbrush. He was tough,” Douglas said.
The actor said those childhood experiences contributed to an emotional distance between father and son that took years to overcome.
“That was also one of the reasons why it took a little time to warm up as we got older, and to forgive him,” Michael explained.
Kirk Douglas died in February 2020 at the age of 103 after one of the most celebrated careers in Hollywood history. His performances in films including Spartacus, Paths of Glory and Lust for Life helped make him one of the defining movie stars of his generation.
For Michael, however, Kirk was more than a Hollywood legend. He was an intimidating figure who could sometimes seem almost larger than life.
“I looked at Dad as just Superman,” Michael recalled. “He was so dynamic. He was so strong. He had such tenacity.”
Growing up in Kirk’s enormous shadow also created doubts about whether Michael could ever build an identity of his own.
“I never thought I could be the man my father was,” he said. “I didn’t think it was in the cards.”
It took years, Michael said, before he developed confidence in himself — even as he eventually became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in his own right.
His career would ultimately include hits such as Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Wall Street, the latter earning him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
But Michael acknowledges that his father passed down more than ambition.
“I think I inherited my father’s tenacity, my father’s ambition and his rage,” he said. “He had a big temper growing up.”
Michael has been similarly candid about his own mistakes, acknowledging that some of the qualities he once struggled with in his father later appeared in his own life.
Still, the relationship between the two men softened over time.
“Time heals, you know. Hopefully,” Michael said. “Life moves on.”
Their complicated bond even became the subject of jokes.
Michael recalled Kirk reacting to his son’s tremendous success after Michael won the Best Actor Oscar for Wall Street.
According to Michael, Kirk told him, “You know, I would have been nicer to you if I knew how successful you were going to be.”
Behind the joke was a remarkable Hollywood story.
Michael did what relatively few children of legendary stars manage to accomplish: he created a career arguably as recognizable as his father’s without escaping comparisons to him.
Kirk apparently understood that their shared success represented something even bigger than competition between father and son.
Michael recalled his father once being asked whether he was jealous of his son’s accomplishments.
Kirk responded by describing Michael’s success as “a sense of immortality, a continuity of generations.”
That idea of family legacy runs throughout One Helluva Ride, which was released October 6.
The memoir traces Michael’s life from a childhood spent in the shadow of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars through his own rise as an actor and producer, along with his marriages, health struggles, substance abuse, relationships and some of the controversies surrounding his decades in Hollywood.
Michael also reveals previously private details about his relationship with Romancing the Stone costar Kathleen Turner.
Douglas says the two “fell hard for each other” while working on the 1984 adventure film. At the time, Michael was separated from his first wife, Diandra Douglas.
According to Michael, the romance came to an end after Diandra visited the movie set with their young son, Cameron.
The revelation is one of several unusually candid admissions in the memoir, but Michael’s reflections on Kirk appear to be among the most personal.
More than six years after his father’s death, Douglas now seems willing to examine both sides of the man he once viewed as “Superman” — the fiercely ambitious Hollywood icon he admired and the difficult father he eventually had to forgive.
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