In “Franklin,” Michael Douglas portrays the iconic founding father as an 18th-century rock star with a dash of Gordon Gekko swagger.
In ‘Franklin,’ Douglas portrays the iconic founding father as an 18th-century rock star with a dash of Gordon Gekko swaggerLOS ANGELES — On a coolish Saturday afternoon in March, the crowd in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel is keeping things at a dull roar. Back in’s day, the restaurant was a metonym for the height of showbiz exclusivity and sophistication; now it’s a destination for selfie-taking tourists and locals splashing out on a loud, boozy lunch.
Fit and relaxed at 79, Douglas doesn’t look like a cultural bellwether as he settles into a booth and orders a cup of peppermint tea. His now-white hair as impeccable as his blue sport coat, Douglas looks more like Hollywood royalty — a notion that has always made him laugh. He grew up in New York and Connecticut, went to college in Santa Barbara and has lived in Los Angeles only briefly.
Style is where The Washington Post covers happenings on the front lines of culture and what it all means, including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion, all told with personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories,Surely there’s a joke in there somewhere about a famous leading man’s career ending with a gig playing Benjamin Franklin.
Douglas’s first stab at producing was when his father gave him the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in exchange for a percentage of Michael’s share of the profits. But he traces his macro-sensibility further back, to when he performed as a young actor at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
For Douglas, professionalism and politesse are expedient — but they’re also principles he learned from both his parents. Douglas was 6 when they divorced, after which his father stayed in L.A. and his mother, actress Diana Douglas, moved him and his brother Joel to New York, where they lived on the Upper West Side “in an apartment facing the alley, not the park.” When Diana married actor-producer-writer Bill Darrid , the family moved to a farmhouse in Westport, Conn.
Rather than make movies, he says, he wants to devote time to his longtime political causes: nuclear nonproliferation, which he became concerned with when he did “The China Syndrome,” and gun control, which became personal in 1980 when he and his friend Jann Wenner were walking home from a Christmas party on Central Park West and happened upon a commotion that turned out to be John Lennon’s murder outside the Dakota apartment building.
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