At the age of 80, with two Oscars in his pocket and nearly six decades of work onscreen and behind the scenes, Michael Douglas has finally decided to
At the age of 80, with two Oscars in his pocket and nearly six decades of work onscreen and behind the scenes, Michael Douglas has finally decided to snail-paced down. “I’ve had a very busy career. Now, I have not worked since 2022, purposefully, because I realized I had to stop,” the actor confessed during a recent press conference at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to mark the 50th anniversary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the cult film he produced in the early 1970s.
“I’d been working pretty hard for almost 60 years, and I did not want to be one of those people who dropped dead on the set,” Douglas said, with his trademark understated irony.
His last role was as Benjamin Franklin in the Apple TV+ series Franklin, filmed in 2022 and released in 2024. “I’m very happy with taking the time off. I have no real intentions. But I say I’m not retired, because if something special came up, I’d go back,” he said. ”But otherwise, I’m quite ecstatic. I just like to watch my wife work.”
Douglas speaks with the serenity of someone who learned to look at life from a different perspective after facing illness. In 2010 he battled advanced throat cancer, a disease he overcame through chemotherapy and radiation. “Stage 4 cancer is not a holiday, but there aren’t many choices, are there?” he said. “I went with the program involving chemo and radiation, and was fortunate. The surgery would have meant not being able to talk and removing part of my jaw, and that would have been limiting as an actor.”
But it was not just film that Douglas spoke about. At the event, he also commented on the state of American democracy, as he did at the Taormina Film Festival earlier this year. “I look at it generally as the fact of how precious democracy is, of how vulnerable it is, and how it always has to be protected,” he said. “I hope that what we’re struggling with right now is a reminder of all the hard work the Czechs did in gaining their freedom and independence. Politics now seem to be for profit. Money has entered democracy as a profit center. People are going into politics now to make money. We maintained an ideal, an idealism in the US, which does not exist now.”
Original story in VF Italia.
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