My dad Kirk told me I was a terrible actor says Michael Douglas
MICHAEL DOUGLAS has revealed that his career got off to a shaky start when even his own father – screen legend Kirk – told him he couldn’t act.
The 68-year-old says his dad – now 96 – came to see his stage debut in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
“Afterwards he said, ‘Son you were terrible!’ And in his heart, I knew, he was relieved because he didn’t have to worry about me becoming an actor,” says Michael, currently separated from wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, with whom he has two children, Dylan, 13 and Cerys, 10.
Michael attributes his lack of early thespian promise to fully embracing the Sixties lifestyle while studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Michael, pictured below with Kirk, recalls: “I was a hippie! I think my dad thought I’d moved west to be closer to him in LA. I wasn’t studying anything. Nothing. We all swam naked, smoked a lot of weed, got high, we had wine stops and festivals. It was a crazy, beautiful time.”
Although Michael went on to win two Oscars for his work on Wall Street and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest he had to overcome crippling nerves.
He says: “By the third year of messing about I was told by the vice chancellor that I had to declare a major. So I chose theatre. Why not? But even then I had no burning desire to become an actor.”