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Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and film producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the AFI Life Achievement Award. The elder son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, Douglas received his Bachelor of Arts in drama from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His early acting roles included film, stage, and television productions. Douglas first achieved prominence for his performance in the ABC police procedural television series The Streets of San Francisco, for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations. In 1975, Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, having acquired the rights to the Ken Kesey novel from his father. The film received critical and popular acclaim, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, earning Douglas his first Oscar as one of the film's producers. Douglas went on to produce films including The China Syndrome (1979) and Romancing the Stone (1984), for which he received the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and The Jewel of the Nile (1985). Douglas received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (a role he reprised in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010). Other notable roles include in Fatal Attraction (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Basic Instinct (1992), Falling Down (1993), The American President (1995), The Game (1997), Traffic (2000), and Wonder Boys (2000). In 2013, for his portrayal of Liberace in the HBO film Behind the Candelabra, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. Douglas starred as an aging acting coach in the Netflix comedy series The Kominsky Method (2018–2021), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy. He has portrayed Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Ant-Man (2015). Douglas has received notice for his humanitarian and political activism. He sits on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, is an honorary board member of the anti-war grant-making foundation Ploughshares Fund and he was appointed as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 1998. He has been married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones since 2000. Early life Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actors Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) and Diana Dill (1923–2015). His parents met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His father was Jewish and was born Issur Danielovitch. Michael's paternal grandparents were emigrants from Chavusy in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda, and had English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, Belgian, and Dutch ancestry. Douglas's uncle was politician Sir Nicholas Bayard Dill, and Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda, as a Member of the Parliament of Bermuda (MCP), and as commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas is a US citizen by birth in the United States and has British citizenship with Bermudian Status through his mother's birth in Bermuda. His great-grandfather, Thomas Newbold Dill (1837–1910), was a merchant, an MCP for Devonshire Parish from 1868 to 1888, a member of the legislative council and an assistant justice from 1888, mayor of the City of Hamilton from 1891 to 1897, served on numerous committees and boards, and was a member of the Devonshire Church (Church of England) and Devonshire Parish vestries. Thomas Newbold Dill's father, another Thomas Melville Dill, was a sea captain who took the Bermudian-built barque Sir George F. Seymour from Bermuda to Ireland in thirteen days in March 1858, but lost his master's certificate after the wreck of the Bermudian-built Cedrine on the Isle of Wight while returning the last convict labourers from the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda to Britain in 1863. The current (installed on 29 May 2013) Bishop of Bermuda, the Right Reverend Nicholas Dill, is a cousin of Michael Douglas. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens. Douglas attended The Allen-Stevenson School in New York City, Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and The Choate Preparatory School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut. He received his B.A. in dramatic art from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1968, where he was also the honorary president of the UCSB Alumni Association. He studied acting with Wynn Handman at The American Place Theatre in New York City. Career 1969–1979: Early years His first TV breakthrough role came with a 1969 CBS Playhouse special, The Experiment—and it was the only time he was billed as "M.K. Douglas". On November 24, 1969, Douglas formed his first independent film production company, Bigstick Productions, Limited. Michael Douglas started his film career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, appearing in little known films such as Hail, Hero!, Adam at 6 A.M., and Summertree. His performance in Hail, Hero! earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Male Newcomer. His first significant role came in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco from 1972 to 1976, in which he starred alongside Karl Malden. Douglas later said that Malden became a "mentor" and someone he "admired and loved deeply". After Douglas left the show, he had a long association with his mentor until Malden's death on July 1, 2009. In 2004, Douglas presented Malden with the Monte Cristo Award of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut for the Lifetime Achievement Award. In late 1971, Douglas received from his father, Kirk Douglas, the rights to the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which had been purchased by Bryna Productions in February 1962. Michael went on to produce the film of the same name with Saul Zaentz. Kirk Douglas hoped to portray McMurphy himself, having starred in an earlier stage version, but was deemed too old for the part by his son Michael. Kirk relented, and the lead role went instead to Jack Nicholson, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Douglas won the Award for Best Picture for producing the film. In December 1976, Michael and his brother Peter became head of their father's film production company, The Bryna Company, though Michael would depart by 1978 to focus exclusively on producing through his own Bigstick Productions. After leaving The Streets of San Francisco in 1976, Douglas played a hospital doctor in the medical thriller Coma (1978), and in 1979 he played the role of a troubled marathon runner in Running. In 1979, he both produced and starred in The China Syndrome,.... Discover the Paul Thomson Sharon Kaye popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Paul Thomson Sharon Kaye books.