Rise to Fame
He got his break not as an actor but as a producer - he acquired the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from his father Kirk, who'd owned the Ken Kesey novel for years but couldn't get it made. The 1975 film won five Oscars including Best Picture. Then in 1987 he pulled off something rarer: in a single year he starred in Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, the second of which won him the Best Actor Oscar for Gordon Gekko. The 'greed is good' speech became more than a movie line - it became the thesis statement of an era.
In the Spotlight
At 80, Douglas has announced he's done. At the 2025 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, he said he hadn't worked since 2022 deliberately and had 'no real intentions' of returning, citing nearly 60 years of continuous work. His last major role was Benjamin Franklin in Apple TV+'s Franklin (2024). The marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones, 25 years his junior, supplied a decade of tabloid material: Stage IV throat cancer in 2010, the HPV revelation in 2013, a brief separation the same year. Both stayed, which tells you something.
Side Notes
He shared an apartment with Danny DeVito in the 1960s before either was famous - DeVito later played the comic foil in Romancing the Stone (1984). His son Cameron spent seven years in federal prison on drug charges, two of them in solitary confinement, before recovering and having two kids of his own. Douglas has been a UN Messenger of Peace since 1998 focused on nuclear disarmament, and donated his entire $1 million Genesis Prize to diversity causes in Jewish life. The guy who played Gordon Gekko has some genuinely earnest commitments.