Sunday, April 25, 2010
He has delivered some of the most sizzling performances ever seen in Hollywood. From Fatal Attraction with Glenn Close to Basic Instinct with Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas has never failed to impress.
And in real life he famously persuaded Catherine Zeta-Jones, 25 years his junior, to become his second wife.
Now the star reveals he learned his romantic skills from two married women who seduced him when he was a naive 16-year-old.
As the son of film idol Kirk Douglas, Michael was regarded as Hollywood royalty. The two women were ‘friends of my mother’s’, the 65-year-old actor says in a magazine interview. ‘I was 16, they were 30.’Douglas does not identify the women as his mother, actress Diana Dill, still does not know about her friends’ adulterous exploits. ‘I wouldn’t want to get any of them in trouble,’ he said. ‘Though they’re probably dead now.’
Growing up in the Sixties, Douglas did not find such episodes shocking. Indeed, his sexual initiation, he says, reminded him of the film The Graduate, in which the young Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is seduced by the middle-aged Mrs Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft.
In the interview, to be published in the May edition of US magazine Elle, Douglas details further escapades from his university days. ‘I remember one woman who’d been pursuing me, and I’d gone back home and was in bed with another lady,’ he says.
At an unbelievably inopportune moment, the first woman popped out of the closet. Let’s just say that took care of the rest of the night.’'He found himself outshone on occasion, however, by his father – whom he describes as an ‘outrageous flirt’.
‘In the years before I met Catherine, there were a couple of ladies who met him to whom he gave his most impressive showing,’ he says.
‘When I was working on pictures with my father, there were a couple of leading ladies to whom I wish I’d expressed how I felt, rather than being too cool or too shy.’
Douglas says they include Austrian actress Senta Berger who, shortly after they met, married another man.
When Douglas first met Miss Zeta-Jones, he seemed anything but shy. His opening comment, as he has often recalled, was: ‘I want to father your children.’
‘That’s not a line I’d used before,’ he tells the magazine. ‘But I don’t know if I’d ever been so inebriated on a first date.’ For the next year, however, they hardly kissed. ‘I was a ridiculous gentleman,’ he says.
Asked if there is a woman with whom he would like to have a one-night stand – provided his wife gave him permission – Douglas says: ‘Boy, oh boy. I’ve always liked Tina Turner.’
Whom does he think his wife might choose in a similar situation? ‘Sarkozy would be pretty interesting.’
In Douglas’s latest movie, Solitary Man, which is out next month, he plays a fiftysomething who tries to pick up younger women by saying he’s ‘gifted in ways no 18-year-old is’.