Michael Douglas: No smoothie in latest movie

By ROBERT WARD

Michael Douglas looks relaxed, with the air of a man who's comfortable in his skin and has nothing to prove any more.

That's long been the case in his professional life. As a producer, he won an Oscar for his first film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and his acting career caught up when he won the best actor Oscar for Wall Street, an accolade that his Hollywood legend father, Kirk, never achieved.

But his personal life has lagged behind. His 24-year marriage to his first wife, Diandra, had been troubled for years — Douglas himself has attributed that partly to the fact that she was only 19 (he was 32), when they married. And he'd been distant from his father since Kirk left his mother Diana when he was 5.

That's all changed now. Last month, at the age of 55, he became a father for the second time in 21 years, and he's planning to marry the mother, sexy Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, 25 years his junior, any day now.

His new son Dylan (just a common Welsh name they liked, nothing to do with Dylan Thomas or Bob) has the trademark Douglas dimple. And the men he inherited it from have become closer since Kirk was in a helicopter crash and suffered a stroke a few years ago.

Douglas has taken flak for vanity casting, for his part in a spate of middle-aged Hollywood leading men being paired with women half their age — Douglas with Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder, Harrison Ford with Anne Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights, Sean Connery with Zeta-Jones in Entrapment. In Douglas' case, life subsequently imitated art.

But he can't be accused of vanity for taking on his new film, Wonder Boys. Director Curtis Hanson, making his first film after the Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential, told Douglas to get fat. The instruction to put on 10kg came at a delicate time for him because he was in the middle of courting Zeta-Jones.

Not only that, but he slouches through the movie unshaven, smoking pot and dressed in a highly unflattering pink bathrobe. Wonder Boys is a far cry from his previous two films, The Game and A Perfect Murder, which he describes as "two very dark movies, two very well- dressed movies."

He wanted to do something different after them. His acting career has customarily switched between the ruthless (Wall Street) and the romantic (Romancing the Stone). Even though Wonder Boys was a small movie, which meant he had to take a pay cut, it appealed to him because it offered the chance to undercut the smooth persona he's cultivated on screen.

The risk he took is underlined by his gratitude to Hanson for creating a safe environment.

"It's very easy at any time in the movie to think that you're making a complete fool of yourself, and he was very good at keeping us all confident."

Douglas plays Grady Tripp, a 50-something English professor whose professional and personal lives go into crisis over one weekend. After making his
reputation with the Great American Novel he'd written years ago, Tripp's now stalled on the follow-up, and new wonder boys are coming up, including his star student James Leer (Tobey Maguire) who has already written a novel.

The fear of not measuring up is familiar territory to Douglas. He had that famous father to contend with, and his early success as a producer left him wondering how he could possibly top that.

"As wonderful as my acting career might look, there was a long time in the beginning where it wasn't happening. And my first four films, I don't think you'll find anywhere, in video or DVD or anywhere else. So there was a time for me as an actor when I didn't have a lot of confidence, nor success, and I didn't really achieve the point where I'd think I had a real career till the 80s, when I was in my 40s, with Fatal Attraction and Wall Street the same year [1987].

"As a producer, my first movie was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I was 30 years old, I won the best picture Oscar and there was definitely a point of saying, 'Ooh, what am I gonna do now?' And I took a couple of years after that to figure out what I was gonna do next."

The first thing he did after winning that Oscar was to take off overseas with Jack Nicholson, who also won his first Oscar for Cuckoo. "I had a good time," he says, remembering the exploits of the testosterone twins with a grin.

"Jack Nicholson and I, we took over a year and a half, travelling around the world. Everybody was happy to see us, you know, so it was fun. We just kept putting off having to think about what's next."

Some aspects of Wonder Boys also take him down memory lane: "I am a child of the 60s, I went to college in the 60s." And as a liberal arts student at the University of California at Santa Bar-bara, he can remember the close relationships between students and staff.

"One of the fun things about this movie is the truth is that you never grow up. When you're a student, you look at your faculty and they look like adults, and then you eventually reach that age and you realise that you haven't changed that much, you still feel that part of you. So I like that whole element in the movie and particularly the fact that most of the truth comes from the students, not from the faculty members."

Douglas modestly denies that the mentor relationship in the film carried over into his dealings with his young co-stars Katie Holmes (TV's Dawson's Creek) and Tobey Maguire (The Cider House Rules) on the set.

"Katie is amazing in her own right," he says. "I don't think she's ever had an acting lesson. She takes whatever dialogue she gets and makes it her own. A lot of times Katie was shooting all day on Dawson's Creek and then would fly up
to Pittsburgh and work all night on our picture. And I think Toby has almost as many movies as I have already. He's got like 19. I've got 28."

Maguire begs to differ about whether he had anything to learn from Douglas: "He would come up with stuff I hadn't thought of and I'd do whatever I could to keep up with him. And it was very inspiring to see someone who's been around for a while still bustin' his ass like he's a kid."

Douglas plans to do that less and less. He blames a lack of good scripts for the fact that he's been making fewer than a film a year recently.

"I find, for the amount of energy you have to put into a movie, I've got to be in love with the movie."

But now his personal life has changed, he says, with a new son and with a new marriage coming up, "I have an opportunity to spend more energies in that than I would have 20 years ago."

*Wonder Boys starts on Thursday at Rialto cinemas.