Hollywood legend Michael Douglas reveals worrying reason he hasn't worked for 3 years
His Hollywood legend father Kirk Douglas carried on working into his nineties, but Michael Douglas says he's happy to 'play the wife' and step away from his acting career at a comparatively youthful 80.
Speaking to Best Magazine, Michael explains that he hasn't actually worked for a few years, and while he hasn't definitively retired, it would take a very special script to lure him back into the studio: 'I say I'm not retired, because if something special came up, I'd go back.'
For now, though, he says he's happy to watch his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, 55, go out to work, while he enjoys his remaining years in peace: 'I did not want to be one of those people who dropped dead on set,' he joked.
Welsh-born Catherine, some 25 years younger than her husband, is still keeping herself very busy, with a variety of film and TV projects on the boil, including Netflix 's hit series Wednesday.
As he winds down from his acting career, though, Michael has reason to be grateful for his old age. In 2010, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue.
The reality behind the diagnosis wasn't made public at the time, with his doctor advising that it would be better to describe his condition as throat cancer, because of the possible negative publicity that might arise from him having such a disfiguring and potentially deadly condition.
He later explained on This Morning that he felt he had to make some sort of announcement, because his treatment meant he had to pull out of a publicity tour for the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
He recalled: 'The surgeon said let's just say it's throat cancer. I said 'OK, you don't want to say it's tongue cancer?', I said 'Why's that?' and he said 'Well, if you really want to know why, if we do have to have surgery it's not going to be pretty. You'll lose part of you jaw and your tongue and all of that stuff.' So I said, 'OK sure.'"
Aggressive chemotherapy sent the cancer into remission, but Michael admits that he went through a very tough time: 'Stage four cancer is not a holiday. You know? It's not a holiday. But there aren't many choices, are there?
'I went with the program involving chemo and radiation, and was fortunate. I had a couple of friends during that same time who were not so lucky.'
He mentions Dallas star Larry Hagman, and songwriter Nickolas Ashford – who had a huge hit with 'Solid' in 1984 – as being diagnosed with the same condition at roughly the same time.
Sadly, neither of them survived.
Michael says that his cancer had probably been brought about by a combination of stress, alcohol abuse, and years of heavy smoking – although, at the time, an offhand remark during an interview with the Guardian led to stories that the main trigger for his cancer had been an infection of the HPV virus, caused by performing oral sex.
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