'It really knocks you out. You just never think it is going to be you. But I'll beat this. The tumour is shrinking. The odds are good. I'm not dealing with mortality issues until I hear otherwise': Michael Douglas on throat cancerHe's got cancer, he lost a fortune in the crash and his son is in prison... But quitting is for wimps, says a tenacious Michael Douglas
Michael Douglas doesn't look like a man facing the toughest battle of his life. He's a little thinner perhaps, but surprisingly upbeat despite having been diagnosed with stage four throat cancer, for which he is undergoing a gruelling combination of chemotherapy and radiation.
'It really knocks you out,' he says, shaking his head. 'You just never think it is going to be you. But I'll beat this. The tumour is shrinking. The odds are good. I'm not dealing with mortality issues until I hear otherwise.'
Supported by his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Douglas is intent on keeping home life as normal as possible for their two children, Dylan, ten, and Carys, seven.
The doctors' prognosis,' he tells me, 'is for a full recovery, and with this type of cancer there is a 70 to 80 per cent chance that it will happen. It doesn't seem to have spread to anywhere else in my body so however difficult the next few months of treatment will be, I'm ready for it and will take things day by day.
'The kids are fine. I've taken them down to the hospital and shown them the whole radiology thing. They've watched me actually get zapped.'
Battling on: Michael looked frail and tired on Friday as he walked his daughter to school in New YorkTypically, Douglas is not resting. He has launched a fundraising campaign and urges people to have regular checks.
'Cancer doesn't care how many Oscars you've won or how many tough guys you've played.'
Adversity is nothing new to Douglas. This is a man who has overcome many previous battles: a difficult relationship with his father Kirk Douglas, a bitter divorce from his first wife Diandra - and more recently seeing his older son Cameron sentenced to five years in jail for possessing heroin and dealing crystal meth and cocaine. He has also been working hard promoting Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and the art-house film A Solitary Man.
Is stress a contributory factor in his illness?
'It's been a long year and I do think it's stress-related,' says Douglas, who also admits this particular type of cancer is caused by smoking and drinking. He's done both for decades.
Recently, he's also had to battle a financial crisis: the 2008 stock market crash.
'I lost 35 to 40 per cent of my net worth,' he says. 'I got whacked big time - it was serious. I was the classic deer in the headlights. I couldn't move, I didn't know what to do - and didn't know what to do with the advice I was getting. There were a couple of huge drops and it kept on going and by the time you woke up the next day, people were down anywhere up to 60 per cent of their net worth. I knew a lot of people who lost everything.'
The actor's assets include houses in Bermuda, New York, Canada, Spain and the Turks and Caicos Islands. His films have grossed more than £1.5 billion. He wasn't exactly left destitute. Indeed, he looks remarkably cool - even chipper - about losing such a hefty chunk of his fortune.
He shrugs and grins. 'Well, when it was happening I decided to just weather the storm. I waited, didn't do anything and the next year we kind of came back to where we were - but I've lost two years and I am much more conservative these days in my investments.'
It was the economic meltdown that propelled Douglas and Oliver Stone into making a sequel to their 1987 hit Wall Street, with Douglas reprising his Oscar-winning role as trader Gordon Gekko.
'It seemed like a very appropriate time to make the film,' Douglas says.
'Back in the Eighties we were rocking and rolling, having a great time, it was all just sexy. Gekko said "greed is good" and that idea hasn't just survived, it's thrived. I was always shocked when so many people said Gekko was the person who inspired them to go into investment banking. I'd say, "Well, I was the villain" and they would say, "No, no, no". They didn't see me that way. It was all very seductive, I guess. But it didn't bother me. I have a history of playing awful people.
'We all live vicariously through villains because they behave in a way that we only fantasise about and never really do ourselves - well most of us.
'I am reminded of Fatal Attraction, which involved a married man having an affair, and the moment I jumped into my bed and rumpled up the covers so it looked like I had slept there the audience laughed. They'd forgiven me.'
Money Never Sleeps takes a fictional look at the build-up to the 2008 financial collapse.
'You try to create your own identity and I thought I could never be the actor Dad was, so I avoided it for a while': Michael on father Kirk Douglas'Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme were just the tip of the iceberg,' says Douglas. 'You look at how a lot of other companies were willing to gamble with people's money, the irresponsibility in the risks people were taking - with no downside to them.
'When we made the first film, insider trading was a personal, individual act as opposed to corporate greed. Now it involves the whole banking industry. The numbers that we're talking about now are staggering, as well as the chicanery and trickery. It's almost like a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean play.'
Researching the role, Douglas spent time with big names in the financial world.
'We went to Shun Lee, the restaurant that is actually used in the movie, and met a hedge fund manager named Jim Chanos, who made a fortune predicting the crash. Then Oliver and I had a meeting with Sam Waksal, who went to jail in 2003 for five years (for securities fraud).'
So which is the new Gekko based on?
'I grew up in New York, I went to private schools with many of these people and I wouldn't embarrass them. I knew them before they took over and ran these huge firms, and they knew me before I was a movie star - I like to protect them. Not everyone on Wall Street is a pig. But one of these guys has a motorcycle that costs a million dollars that is flown all around the world with him.
These guys go shooting in Spain, they have the Vertu $70,000 mobile phone. Right now they're into G5 Gulfstream jets - some have more than one. It is a rarefied world. Everyone outdoes each other.'
Is greed good?
'It's motivation in a sense, it incentivises you,' he says slowly. 'Look, capitalism is part of our system but it's not for the faint of heart. I am a capitalist and a humanitarian too. You can be both. I think.'
A few months earlier, over breakfast at a studio in Hollywood, he told me how di fferent his and Catherine Zeta-Jones's life is from that of the billionaires in the film.
'Other people might go to lovely hotels. We are blessed to have great houses, being celebrities and needing the privacy, but it's not a terrible amount of overhead. I don't own a plane - we rent. In the summertime we'll charter a boat for the family. I am not extravagant,' he says.
Not even with Catherine?
'Well, I am always buying her something. Catherine loves antique jewellery. I'm due to get her something for our tenth anniversary, which is coming up.'
'I was just bowled over by Catherine (Zeta-Jones). When I discovered she loved golf, I realised all my fantasies had come true,' said Micheal If it's anything like their party last September - her 40th, his 65th - she can expect something special.
'We don't throw that many parties, so we said, "What the hell." We took over the rooftop of the St Regis Hotel in New York and decked it out; we had great food, an awesome rock 'n' roll band, a bunch of friends from New York, Catherine's friends and relatives from Wales - it was an eclectic group with overlapping ages; it rocked.'
Were gifts exchanged?
'I bought her a Coton de Tuléar puppy called Figaro. I'm having to walk him most of the time, which is not what I had in mind. She got me a great hot rod. I used to belong to a hot rod club when I was young and she bought me a beautiful 1933 Ford with a big 325 cubic inch Chevy engine and a gorgeous paint job: it's got the suicide door on the front and there's a back seat for the kids - I'm enjoying it.'
It is obvious Douglas - once a ladies' man - is totally devoted to his wife. He saw her in The Mask Of Zorro in 1998 and was instantly smitten. He met her later that year at a film festival and famously told her: 'I want to father your children.' They married in 2000.
He says now: 'Catherine was a tremendous surprise. I was puttering along quite well as a single guy there for a while (the actor's marriage to first wife Diandra ended in 1995) and couldn't believe how honest you could be with ladies, as long as you didn't date two of them in the same town.
'I just couldn't believe it - it was fun, I was enjoying the process. What you see is what you get, I would tell them. And then I just got struck down. I was just bowled over by Catherine. When I discovered she loved golf, I realised all my fantasies had come true.'
Does the age difference worry him?
'Well it's been irrelevant to us, but people raise it and it's a valid question. I mean, I'm going to be 75 when my son is 18 years old and my daughter is 16. But my dad is 93 and my mother 87. I tell my kids they are going to live to over 100,' he says, unaware of his forthcoming cancer diagnosis.
Douglas returns to New York the next day. Soon afterwards I fly to Paris for another meeting with the star at the Ritz Hotel. He is there to meet world leaders for the Global Zero conference against nuclear weapons, in his capacity as a UN messenger of peace.
'It seemed like a very appropriate time to make the film (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps),' said Michael (above with co-star Shia LaBeouf)'I am very optimistic right now,' he says. 'As we speak the U.S. and Russia are finishing up their START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) negotiations, which will mean a dramatic reduction of weapons. We have a pretty realistic goal over 20 years of completely eliminating nuclear weapons. That will be effectively a fabulous, tremendous breath of fresh air.'
At the time of this meeting, he is deeply upset about his son Cameron, 31, who has for some time been confined to a minimum-security prison camp in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
'Cameron's made a couple of big mistakes in his life. He's paid the price. On the other side of it, he's sober. I really enjoy getting to know him again. I'm hopeful for his future.'
Douglas is the first to confess his own shortcomings as a parent earlier in life.
'My career was the most important thing to me, followed by marriage and children,' he says.
'There were absences, I know I made mistakes. It is completely reversed now and my priorities are entirely different. I am not so self-obsessed.'
Michael and British actress Carey Mulligan, who plays his daughterDouglas was raised with his brother Joel by their mother Diana on the East Coast, visiting his father, Kirk Douglas, in LA only during holidays. Was that hard?
'You don't know anything else, do you?' he says. 'And I was blessed that my mother remarried a great guy (William Darrid). Step-parents never get enough credit.'
As a teenager, there were no plans to follow in his father's footsteps.
'You try to create your own identity and I thought I could never be the actor Dad was, so I avoided it for a while.'
Nevertheless, by 1972 Douglas was starring in hit TV series The Streets Of San Francisco. But his first real success was as the producer of the Oscar-winning One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It wasn't enough; for years he felt he was living in his father's shadow.
'It was hard in every way. There are big resemblances between us, but he was larger than life - he was Spartacus, an icon.'
Douglas continued to produce but also became a leading man with roles in films such as Romancing The Stone, Fatal Attraction, The Jewel Of The Nile, The War Of The Roses and Black Rain.
'Winning the Oscar for Wall Street was meaningful for me as a second-generation kid, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It really meant a lot. My father jokes with me. A few years ago he said, "You know, Michael, if I knew you were going to be so successful I'd have been much nicer to you."'
There is one more film, already wrapped, that could prove controversial. In Solitary Man he plays a womaniser who believes he hasn't got long to live and ends up in bed with a young student played by English actress Imogen Poots. There is a 40-year age difference between them - even for Douglas, this is extreme.
'I think sometimes in relationships ladies like having a man who takes care of them, nurtures them. If you can't find it in a man your own age, you find it in somebody who is older,' he says.
'I was always shocked when so many people said (Gordon) Gekko was the person who inspired them to go into investment banking. I'd say, "Well, I was the villain". They didn't see me that way. It was all very seductive''There are people who are in love with their father and then look for a figure who gives them the same security. In the film, this was just one of those nights where one thing led to another. There's a
Can you identify with him?
'Sure, yeah, I can certainly relate to somebody who's leading with the lower extremities of his body and not thinking of consequences or responsibilities.'
The final time we meet Douglas is now halfway through his treatment for cancer: 'I'm in an intensive combination of radiation and chemo. It seems to be going fine. The family has been very supportive, but there's not a lot anybody can do, you just have to do the programme. But it's a new world. The support I've been getting has been amazing.
'Catherine and I are talking about taking the kids out of school for a year and trying to go around the world - that would be nice.
'And there are other things I want to do at this stage of life. I would like to finally learn some Spanish.
'But my focus is my family. You know, some people make more of an effort with strangers than the people closest to them. I don't care about any of that any more.
From now on I'm going to spend all my efforts on the people I am close to.'
source: dailymail
