One Helluva Ride

Hollywood icon Michael Douglas tells the unfiltered story of his life for the first time. “This book is about where I came from, what I fought against, and what I chose for myself. Fame can blur the truth; this is my attempt to bring it back into focus.” A legendary actor and Hollywood Icon whose five-decade career spans film, television, and producing, Michael Douglas has won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, five Golden Globes, a Primetime Emmy, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award, among many others. Douglas starred in and produced some of the most successful movies of all time, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Romancing the Stone, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction, Black Rain,Wall Street, Basic Instinct,Disclosure, The Game, Wonder Boys, Traffic, and Behind the Candelabra. His films have defined cultural moments and sometimes whole decades. In this raw, career-sweeping memoir, he tells the unfiltered story of his life. Initially dismissed as only Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas’ handsome son, Douglas stunned Hollywood and the world when he won his first Oscar at just thirty years old for producing the multi-Academy Award winning classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Once told he would be nothing more than a television actor, he walked off the hit series The Streets of San Francisco to become a global movie star whose films have grossed billions of dollars. Rejected for serious acting roles that he saw go to his Hollywood pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, he refused to be typecast and won his second Academy Award for his iconic performance as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Beginning with Douglas's childhood and complicated relationship with his father, the memoir traces his path to success with news-breaking behind-the-scenes stories of his rise to fame. Yet as Douglas’s fame rose, so did his personal struggles, and here for the first time is the full, candid story of the challenges he and his family faced, from affairs with some of the most celebrated actresses in Hollywood, his own serious drug addiction which threaten to destroy his first marriage and career, the heartbreaking battle to save his son from a terrible drug addiction that sent him to federal prison at thirty-one years old, and an against-all-odds battle with stage four cancer. His love affair with Oscar winner Catherine Zeta Jones was initially dismissed as just another Hollywood relationship, but they proved the skeptics wrong about their age gap and stayed together through relationship troubles, health issues, tabloid gossip and are still going strong after twenty-five years of marriage.