Michael Douglas lives his new 79 years as if he were 30. His last three fiction films confirm it: they were only superheroes. His stay in the star system is becoming shorter, but it is still valid. At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, for example, he received an Honorary Palme d’Or.
Michael is also very present on social networks, where he appears before his million followers in videos of inspiring messages or playing golf in the company of his wife, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.
And he went through them all: he had a million-dollar divorce, countless marital problems with Catherine, his son Cameron went to prison, he had a zigzag bond with his father and suffered from tongue cancer (at first he said it was throat cancer, but No, it was language. He hid it for image reasons).
Of the actor’s extra-professional milestones described above, the absence of what is perhaps the biggest myth about him stands out: his sex addiction.
Is Michael Douglas really addicted to sex? Was it all a lie? Let’s delve a little deeper into a topic that – this is confirmed – haunted him better than a shadow from the nineties until today.
The rumor arose in 1992, when the actor was still married to Diandra Luker, his first wife. He didn’t know it, but they were the last years of his long marriage; The bond was very worn. In the context of the premiere of Basic Instinct, the unforgettable film in which Michael co-stars with Sharon Stone, a British tabloid media published for the first time the “information” that the actor suffered from sex addiction.
At the same time, Douglas had spent a month in a rehabilitation clinic in Texas (Sierra Tucson), which had treatments for people with compulsive sexual behaviors, and rumors spread that he was constantly cheating on his wife.
Three years later, Luker asked for a divorce and in 2000, finally and a millionaire in between, they separated permanently. Later, Michael would say that the marriage should have ended much sooner.
Since 1992, when the British media published the article that claimed his sex addiction, Michael began to be mentioned not only as the son of Kirk and the Fatal Attraction actor, but also as the Hollywood star addicted to sex. The combo of internment in Sierra Tucson-Basic Instinct-Journalism was deadly.
Douglas didn’t like that being said, so in the mid-nineties he gave his lawyers free rein to take action against anyone who referred to him as a sex addict.
Because no, Michael was never addicted to sex. He himself took it upon himself to debunk the myth. In 1999 it could already be read in media such as The Independent that Douglas had not been admitted to Sierra Tucson for a sexual issue, but to treat his addiction to alcohol and drugs.
Of course: it was said – and this did not help at all to debunk the myth – that during that stay in Texas Michael told a group of treatment colleagues: “Sex is a wave that envelops me. When the need arises “I’m helpless.”
John Parker wrote in his 2017 biography that Michael brought eight members together on that occasion and also confessed that “his wife had ‘kicked’ him out of the room, repulsed by his seemingly uncontrollable actions.”
Already in 2015, Douglas himself was the one who spoke on the subject. In an interview with Event, the actor said: “Let me explain how that whole sex addiction thing happened. I had a problem with alcohol; I had just lost my stepfather and it was a good rehab session, it certainly helped me figure out a couple things”.
“Basic Instinct had just come out and I don’t remember who the clever editor in London was, but they came up with the sex addiction thing. It became a new disease. No one had heard of it until then, but it stuck with me ever since. And it still shows up again and again…” he continued.
The gossip was so much that Kirk, his father, laughed about it and referred to him as “the sex addict.” “That little lie that got a lot of press affected the way people looked at me,” Douglas said.
Where sex did pose a problem for his health was the tongue cancer that was revealed that he had at the beginning of the last decade.
In a piece with The Guardian from 2013, Michael said that his illness in particular may have been caused by HPV (human papillomavirus), which “actually comes from cunnilingus.”
“I was worried if the stress caused by my son’s incarceration wasn’t helping to trigger it. But yes, it is a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer. And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure,” Douglas said.
The cinema took advantage of this rumor in 2009, when Michael had to play a libidinous man in A Lonely Man. In that film by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, Douglas plays a car chain owner who sees his career and personal life ruined due to his continuous indiscretions.
