Free Michael Douglas: Acting on Instinct by Michael Douglas, John Parker Page A

throat. I enjoyed the drugs
     experience because – and this sounds corny – it made you feel like somebody. Don’t ask me who. I could be anyone because I
     had been there. New England. Europe. Hollywood. I could change with the wind. Reality was a complete stranger.’
    Other aspects also turned him away from the communal existence. The West Coast became heavily populated by con artists, fleecing
     young people and moving them on to harder drugs or using the hippie scene simply to hide from the law or the draft. And by
     then, the realisation was dawning that in thelast stages of his educational life he would have to buckle down to work. His parents were still hoping that he would yet
     choose a respectable profession. But the man who professed he never wanted to be like his father did the opposite – to use
     his own word, he ‘slunk’ into acting.
    Kirk Douglas had three key reasons for wanting to keep his sons out of the business. The first was the stark economic statistic
     that, at any given time, eighty-five per cent of actors in America were unemployed. Secondly, although Hollywood had provided
     him with a remarkable opportunity, he would not wish the place on his worst enemy. Like Gable years earlier, he regarded the
     hierarchy collectively, and largely without exception, as bastards.
    Thirdly, and perhaps most important of all, he wanted to shield his sons from what he believed to be the most debilitating
     experience of all for people who made it in the business: what he saw as wanton, often wilful, hurtful and destructive criticism
     of the work of actors, whether on stage or on film.
    He reckoned that, in a single sentence, critics who were neither constructive nor objective could ruin an actor and shatter
     his confidence. There were instances in Kirk’s past where critics’ words were burned on his memory and would remain there,
     quotable, forever, not least the battering he received for his stage version of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. It hurt him so much that the cast had taken a full-page advertisement in
Variety
to tell the critics what they thought of them; Kirk still lost the battle, and the play closed. Since then, he had hawked
     the film rights around every movie studio in Hollywood and had failed to find a backer.
    He said he did not want his boys to have to face what he had been through on that score.
    Kirk, who could always sound off with a well-chosen piece of psycho-talk, came up with another well-quoted one-liner about
     the need ‘for parents to remember what it’s like being an adolescent’. He was bitterly disappointed by his own father’s failure
     to applaud the way he got on in life or to praise his work as an actor. But when Kirk first saw Michael in a play he promptly
     ignored his own feelings on two counts – as a critic and as a parent.
    It was during the obligatory period of reading Shakespeare that Michael took a smallish role in
As You Like It
. He invited Kirk and Anne to the college theatre at Santa Barbara for the performance and afterwards sought his father’s
     views on both the play and more particularly his own performance in it. ‘You were terrible,’ said Kirk, and marched off muttering
     that the whole idea of Michael’s becoming an actor was plain stupid.
    Kirk would claim much later that there was a particular reason for that criticism, delivered in a way that might have been
     written in a newspaper after an opening night on Broadway (and which was apparently well deserved). Kirk earnestly hoped that
     by hitting him hard, Michael would rid himself of thoughts of becoming an actor and turn to studying law. If anything, Kirk’s
     ploy had the opposite effect.
    Michael went ahead with renewed vigour. Doubtless there was an incentive swirling around in his brain, like ‘I’ll show the
     bastard’. And by the end of that very year he was voted Best Actor of 1967 for his performance in
Candida
at the UCSB. Michael was a star on the campus not