Michael Douglas

Michael Douglas began with two problems: a famous surname and a television series that would not release him. The Streets of San Francisco ran from 1972 to 1976 and made him recognisable rather than important. His fix was to step behind the camera. In 1975 he produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a project his father had held the rights to for years without getting it made, and the following spring it took the Academy Award for Best Picture. He was thirty-one.

Producing continued to do the heavy lifting. The China Syndrome in 1979 reached cinemas days before the accident at Three Mile Island, which no publicist could have arranged. Romancing the Stone in 1984 was his own production and gave him a leading-man register he had not previously shown. Then came 1987, an implausible year by any measure: Fatal Attraction and Wall Street inside twelve months. The second brought him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1988.

Gordon Gekko set the terms for everything afterwards. Douglas spent the following decade playing men under siege, usually of their own making - Basic Instinct in 1992, Falling Down in 1993, Disclosure in 1994. The American President in 1995 was the corrective, and a reminder that audiences could simply like him. It is a narrow band of work, but he was unusually good at the specific thing: the professional man discovering, around minute forty, that he has no idea what he is doing.

The later career is the genuinely unusual part. Douglas kept collecting hardware long after the peak had passed - the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2004, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009, a Primetime Emmy in 2013 for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra, a Golden Globe in 2019 for The Kominsky Method. The photographs from 1987 show a man performing appetite for a living. The recent ones show someone who no longer has to, and who looks considerably better company for it.