In “A Perfect Murder,” the film inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder,” Michael Douglas plays a millionaire industrialist who discovers his wife is cheating on him — and arranges to have her killed.
It is not the kind of role most Hollywood superstars clamor for. It’s hard to imagine Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson ever playing a murderous cuckold — much less one who derives so much fun out of terrorizing poor Gwyneth Paltrow.
Douglas, however, is right at home in “A Perfect Murder.” As an actor, he prefers shades of gray, if not the inky darkness. Douglas achieved his greatest fame playing morally weak or ambiguous men: adulterers, connivers, misanthropes, victimized saps. Even when they fit into the traditional “hero” trappings, Douglas’ characters are often flawed. They’re mean-tempered. They’re physically abusive. They drink too much. They smoke.
“Too many actors get very concerned about the political correctness of their roles,” Douglas says. “Actresses in particular have a fear of being disliked. It makes them nervous. I, on the other hand, revel in it.”
His enthusiasm is evident on the screen. “A Perfect Murder” is a glossy, disposable film, but it’s also shrewdly effective and hard to resist, thanks mostly to Douglas’ devilish performance. Playing the villain-you-love-to-hate is a simple trick most any actor can pull off. It’s much harder to embrace a loathsome character’s “essence” so thoroughly that the audience is seduced by their arrogance, their selfishness, their misguided righteousness.
That’s what Douglas does in ” A Perfect Murder” — and, to varying degrees, has done throughout his career. “The joy of playing a pure villain is that there is no moral dilemma,” he says. “Audiences love them because we’re all caught up by our civility, our social responsibility, our sense of what’s right. It’s fun to watch someone who has no sense of that whatsoever just rip it up. There’s a little part in all of us that says `I wish I could do that.’ “
Douglas won a Best Actor Oscar in 1988 for his work in “Wall Street” as Gordon Gekko, a cynical, steel-hearted investment banker who was nothing less than greed personified. In “The War of the Roses” — perhaps the most bitter comedy about divorce ever made — he and Kathleen Turner played warring spouses whose hatred for each other was so intense, they killed each other.
In the controversial “Falling Down,” Douglas gave voice to disenfranchised middle-class rage, playing a besieged man who snaps under the cacophony of modern society and stalks off on a rampage through Los Angeles, packing heavy artillery. And in last fall’s “The Game,” Douglas starred as a powerful businessman so bitter and alienated, he had no one to turn to for help when it seemed like he had been marked for murder.
Douglas dives into these characters unapologetically. He doesn’t worry about the effects such cretins may have on his off-screen persona, because he’s kept that persona purposely vague.
“I don’t think people have been able to label me,” he says. “I’ve been able to maintain a degree of privacy in my personal life, so (the public) can’t really pinpoint who you are. And I always serve the movie, rather than try to turn it into a star vehicle to perpetuate whatever my image is. I let the movie be the star, because I learned early on it doesn’t matter how good I am. Unless the movie’s good, no one’s going to go see it.”
Smoking Marlboro Lights in a Manhattan hotel suite, clad in a black leather jacket, dress shirt and slacks, Douglas, 53, looks more like a well-heeled accountant than the worldwide box-office draw that he is. He has his famous father Kirk’s defiant jaw line and cleft chin. But there’s still an Everyman quality to Douglas. He’s an unlikely movie star.
For a while, he almost didn’t become one. After floundering for several years on the TV series “The Streets of San Francisco,” Douglas tried his hand at producing. The result, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” won five Academy Awards in 1976, including Best Picture. That film’s success led to some big acting roles — “Coma,” “It’s My Turn,” “Running” — none of which left an impression.
Douglas appeared in the uncannily prescient “The China Syndrome” in 1979, which he also produced. But it was a supporting role in a movie dominated by Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. Hollywood had so little confidence in Douglas as an actor, he was not allowed to play the lead in “Starman,” a movie he produced (the role went to Jeff Bridges, who earned an Oscar nomination for it).
It wasn’t until the back-to-back box-office hits ” Romancing the Stone” (1984) and “The Jewel of the Nile” (1985) that Douglas became a bankable name. But the movies he’s made since then haven’t always been such sure things. He’s portrayed straight-arrow types — “The American President,” “The Ghost and the Darkness,” “Shining Through” — but those have also been his least interesting films.
Douglas has fared better in more ambivalent territory, like “Fatal Attraction,” in which he cheated on his loving wife — and still managed to retain the audience’s sympathies when the one-night stand turned into a nightmare.
In the controversial “Basic Instinct,” Douglas starred as a violence-prone cop who lived happily ever after with an ice-pick-wielding killer (notoriously played by Sharon Stone). And in “Disclosure,” where the issue of sexual harassment was turned on its head, Douglas played a businessman victimized by his dragon-lady boss (Demi Moore).
The thematic similarities of those roles — average guy preyed upon by sexually carnivorous, independent women — led to Douglas being labeled the “Indiana Jones of the men’s movement,” a label that still lingers today.
“I get rapped about that all the time,” Douglas says. “But I’m tired of women using sexual politics as a defense mechanism. I’m not against women, but I am in defense of men. The women’s movement brought about some wonderful things, like equality in the workplace. But it also created an ideal most women could not possibly fulfill: the idea that you could have a successful career, be a successful mother, a successful wife and a successful homemaker. You can’t do it all — nobody can — and there’s a disillusionment that comes with that.
“For a long time, guys felt a little lost as to what their part in all this was. Men suddenly realized a woman could be artificially inseminated, she could have a baby on her own, she could satisfy herself — well, we both can, to some extent. Women are more ingrained with the Earth — they have cycles like the moon — whereas guys only identify themselves through their work. I think I’ve just been supportive of a generation of men that became lost in how they saw their role in life. It’s kind of changed now, though.”
