Michael Douglas

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today. Oscar-winning actor and producer Michael Douglas has spent much of his career playing men consumed by money, ambition, sex, and control. As Gorton Getko in Wall Street he made greed is good a catchphrase. And fatal attraction and basic instinct desire turns dangerous.

And in the war of the roses, marriage becomes warfare. And in traffic, the drug war reaches a father's own family. In his new memoir, One Hell of a Ride, Michael Douglas writes that playing these flawed American men Wasn't exactly a stretch. He grew up the son of Kirk Douglas, one of the biggest movie stars of his generation.

Michael won his first Oscar for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a film his father had spent years trying to make so he could star in it. And when Michael later won an Oscar for acting in Wall Street. He thanked his father for helping a son step out of a shadow. But the memoir also looks at what was happening off screen. A troubled first marriage affairs.

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