Sex, cocaine and blood on set: Michael Douglas bares it all

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Set us as preferred Movie stars are an endangered species.They still exist, sure.

Their beautiful faces still fill 50-foot screens, beaming down on us.Yet, there is a shortage of, say, Michael Douglas.

A man who, over the span of decades, played an American president, a troubled detective, and a Wall Street tycoon so convincingly that the FBI recruited the actor to do a PSA for investment bankers about the perils of financial fraud.On the Shelf One Helluva Ride By Michael Douglas Grand Central Publishing: 496 pages, $35If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The night before I meet Michael Douglas on Zoom, I have a hard time sleeping.I want to be well-rested before I meet the leading man — perhaps one of the last leading men from an era in Hollywood that felt limitless.

What do I mean by that? He’ll tell you.His new memoir details his movie-making career as a prolific producer and actor, along with his affair with his “Romancing the Stone” co-star Kathleen Turner, mudslides in Mexico, snorting cocaine with O.J.

Simpson, encounters with Princess Diana and screaming matches with Paul Verhoeven that end in blood.In short: the life of a movie star.Halfway through our conversation, something unanticipated happens: Douglas reveals that he doesn’t quite see himself as a movie star.

After gentle pushback, he elaborates.Instead, Douglas sees himself as a chameleon.“People say to me: Michael Douglas.

When I see your name, I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be good,” he says.He’s speaking from his home in New York.Behind him is a moody 18th-century Orientalist painting, its scene too indistinct for me to make out.

His smiling face — which, like most American moviegoers, I had watched 50 feet t...