“There’s definitely an uncomfortable age difference.”Then there is another throwaway remark of Douglas: “There is nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.” Could he really be so flippant? The answer is, yes. “It’s sort of creepy if in real life I’d be married to Michael Douglas,” reflected Gwyneth Paltrow about her screen husband in A Perfect Murder. Does Miss Zeta Jones understand quite how she is reaping the benefits of a fling with Douglas? Not every young actress sees things Douglas’s way. I know that for some of the young women I do meet, a relationship can be envisioned as a benefit to their career”. He has complained that it is “difficult for me to meet women because my crowd is much older.

“I, on the other hand, revel in it.”He also has an uncanny knack of putting his foot in it Almost every notable remark could come back to haunt him. Harrison Ford could never even try.Andrew Davis, who directed A Perfect Murder, says: “A lot of your leading men will not allow themselves to look this malevolent They don’t want to be booed But Michael likes this.” Douglas admits this is the case “Actresses have more fear of being disliked,” he once said. These are the sort of slightly dodgy parts that make many stars, especially the younger ones, wary of their image Brad Pitt does not go there. For A Perfect Murder, last year’s remake of Hitchcock’s classic Dial M for Murder, he was a homicidal husband. His real strength, as it turned out, was for playing bad guys or, if not bad exactly, then bleak, abandoned and doomed.In Falling Down, Douglas was the quintessential angry white male.

After making Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, he moved to television, starring in the crime series The Streets of San Francisco. His first job was as an assistant film editor, working on his father’s Lonely Are the Brave. On and off the screen, there is something inevitable about his downfall.To be fair, he never set out to be a matinee idol. Then there is his face, a crumpled version of his father’s, but with the look of someone who constantly suspects he is about to be found out Imagine Eeyore caught with nude photos of Christopher Robin. There is the periodic bare buttock flashing in his movies, those pale orbs which suggest not so much Hollywood stud as 1950s British naturist film. In front of and behind the camera, he is a genuine Hollywood star.Yet there is something irredeemably gruesome about Douglas. Before that he had taken another Academy Award for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest In a long career there are surprisingly few duds.

He has never been the “son of” in that slightly pathetic manner of other showbiz clans His 1987 Oscar for Best Actor in Wall Street was well won. Even his own father, Kirk Douglas, observed after seeing Fatal Attraction: “You see, at last you played yourself, and see how well you did.”If there is a tragedy in Douglas’s life, it is not that he has been constantly shaded by a famous father, but that he has let his personal failings overwhelm his professional achievements. In Wall Street he was a cold predator, in Basic Instinct the sexual plaything of Sharon Stone, an adulterer in Fatal Attraction, locked in a bitter and protracted divorce for War of the Roses You can see how tongues will wag. He just does it a lot.He often complains that people have confused his life and art, that they muddle the performer with the part. His time in rehab at Sierra Tucson (which also did a neat job reviving Ringo Starr) was for drugs and booze So, for the record, Michael Douglas is not sex addict No, indeed.

Douglas has now let it be known that he will set loose his lawyers on anyone who calls him a sex addict. “When the urge comes, I am helpless.”No wonder it is frequently reported that Douglas suffers from “sexual addiction”, having attended a celebrity clinic in Arizona which specialises in treating the condition. Indeed his fame as an actor and producer is only matched by his reputation as a serial swordsman “Sex is a wave that just sweeps over me,” he once admitted. There are so many notches on the Douglas bedpost that it must now resemble a carpenter’s workbench.