Michael Douglas was never his father Kirk – he was better

There’s a strange story about the Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, who died in 2020, watching one of his old movies late at night on TV. Try as he might, he just couldn’t remember which one it was. “And then I realised it wasn’t me,” he told his son (and fellow actor) Michael Douglas. “It was you…” It’s a throwaway anecdote contained in Marc Eliot’s 2012 biography of the Wall Street and Fatal Attraction star, but sums up perfectly the enormous challenges Douglas has faced in putting clear space between himself and the father he so closely resembles.

At the opening of the Cannes Film Festival next week, Douglas will receive an honorary Palme D’Or in “recognition of his brilliant career”. Douglas has a long association with Cannes. He first walked up the red carpet with nuclear disaster drama The China Syndrome in 1979, and has been back to the French Riviera with such movies as Paul Verhoeven’s “sulphurous” (as the Cannes press office calls it) erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), in which he played an American everyman turned baseball-bat-wielding vigilante, and Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013), in which he gave one of his most delightful performances as the high camp entertainer, Liberace.

These are just some of the immensely varied roles Michael has played over the last 50 years. You can add to them louche professors (Wonder Boys in 2000), adulterous yuppies in peril (1987’s Fatal Attraction), money-hungry monsters (his Gordon Gekko in 1987’s Wall Street), rugged Indiana Jones types (1984’s Romancing the Stone), conservative judges (2000’s Traffic), nerdy Marvel scientists (Hank Pym in the Ant-Man movies) and curmudgeonly old actors (Netflix’s The Kominsky Method). Nonetheless, almost every book or article about him frames his story as a real-life Oedipal drama. Even Cannes invokes Kirk’s name as it pays what it calls “a vibrant tribute” to his son.