IFFI: Actor Michael Douglas reveals scenes from his life

Panaji: Hollywood actor and producer Michael Douglas shared incidents from his personal life in the course of a conversation on the concluding day of the International Film Festival of India here.

For a long time, he said, his children didn’t know he was an actor. “They thought their mother was an actress and their dad was a good pancake maker,” he said. That was because, he explained, he hadn’t acted in any film that he could show his children.

Douglas is best known for films such Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992). In the latter film, he plays a detective who gets drawn into a passionate relationship with the prime suspect, a writer played by Sharon Stone.

Douglas’s wife Catherine Zeta-Jones is also visiting India with him. He received the Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award at the festival closing ceremony on Tuesday.

At the masterclass, Douglas spoke about how he had survived Stage 4 cancer—the radiation caused his voice to change to a rasp—and coped with the incarceration of his son for a drug crime. “He was in prison for seven and a half years, two and a half in solitary confinement,” he recalled.

The conversation was conducted by actor Shailendra Singh, whose tabloid-style questions (‘What is your wife’s shoe size?’) left Douglas amused, and later brought out his sarcastic side.

“Wear Shailendra’s shoes… it will save the planet,” he joked, pointing to the host’s glittering shoes, and taking a dig at his deviation from cinema to climate advocacy. The title of the session was ‘Is it time for one world cinema?’ but the conversation barely touched on the theme.

Kannada actor-director Rishabh Shetty was the star attraction in the morning. At a press conference, he said he had received many offers to do films in Hindi and other languages, but he has turned them down respectfully. “I will continue to make Kannada films, and it is now possible to take films across India because of dubbing,” he said.

He also spoke about Kantara Chapter 1, the prequel whose teaser he had launched a day earlier.

When DH asked if he would continue on the Kantara route and make intense films and not return to comedy, a genre he had explored successfully in Bell Bottom (2021), he said he would definitely like to do comedy. “Kamal Haasan called me aside and asked if I liked doing comedy. In fact, comedy is dear to my heart. Even a bereavement scene has a comic side,” he said.