Michael Douglas on 'immortality,' Kirk Douglas and the memories he once avoided

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Douglas, the award-winning actor and producer, recently turned 82. He is a cancer survivor, a recovered addict, a married man, the father and son of actors. He is also an author, who begins his memoir with a message of thanks to his family — past and present and future — for the “sense of immortality.” Immortality.

“Many times my father was asked, ‘Kirk, are you jealous of your son?’” he said during a recent interview at a Manhattan hotel, referring to his late father, fellow actor and sometime combatant Kirk Douglas. “And he said, ‘Jealous?’ This is a sense of immortality, a continuity of generations.’” Family is how Douglas anchors his legacy and his place in a world he fears is breaking down. But there are other ways to live on past your own time: starring in cultural touchstones like “Fatal Attraction” or “Basic Instinct,” or writing a 500-page book that is called “One Helluva Ride,” a famous man’s journey from rebellion and coming-of-age, to midlife success and transgression to the inevitable reckoning with mortality and past mistakes.

Publishing on Tuesday, his memoir is framed around the making of some of his most notable movies, including “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Falling Down,” “Romancing the Stone” and two films that brought him Oscars: as a producer of best picture winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and as star of “Wall Street,” when his turn as corporate raider Gordon Gekko brought him the prize for best actor and helped make “Greed is good” a catch phrase for the late 1980s. Douglas himself was once enough a symbol of hedonism that he was rumored to be undergoing treatment for sex addiction. False, he says, but in his memoir he acknowledges that at the time he met Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he married in 2000, he was dating five other women.

They were all in different cities, he explained during his interview, and “as long as you weren’t seeing somebody else in the same city that might embarrass her, they were all right.” He is now well settled with Zeta-Jones and satisfied enough with his career that he no longer has any great drive to top himself; he’s just as happy taking a walk in the garden. But Douglas also sees the book as a baring of dilthe most painful moments of his life: his near-archetypal quest to forge an identity apart from his father; a childhood damaged by violence and divorce that onl…