Watch: Michael Douglas Says He Once Told Julia Roberts to Stick an Award “Where the Sun Don’t Shine”
Michael Douglas felt the harshest effects of fame at an early age.
While reflecting what it was like being the son of movie star Kirk Douglas, the Basic Instinct star revealed that he narrowly escaped two men attempting to kidnap him outside of his family’s New York apartment.
“When I was eight years old, I was swinging around on the awning outside of our apartment building,” Douglas recalled in his memoir One Helluva Ride, which was released Oct. 6. “Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a man pressing himself against the building’s wall, behind the front door. He was looking right at me.”
Then, Douglas noted that he noticed “another man striding directly toward” him from across the street—and both men began to encroach upon him.
“I began to back down the sidewalk,” he recalled. “The two men kept coming. I felt like my heart was about to jump out of my chest. I reached the end of our building and dashed down a ramp to the basement. As I opened the basement door, I turned back and saw they were chasing me.”
Thinking quickly, Douglas—whose mom was Diana Dill—ducked into the boiler room to hide, adding, “My pulse was roaring in my ears with such a force I thought the would-be kidnappers might hear it.”
As he hid, the Fatal Attraction actor—dad to Cameron, 47, with ex Diandra Luker as well as Dylan, 26, and Carys, 23, with wife Catherine Zeta-Jones—noticed the feet of the men stomping by “looking for their prey.”
“I waited there as long as I could, then made a break for the elevator,” he shared. “All I wanted was the safety of our apartment. Fortunately, the elevator car was already at basement level. It was an old-style elevator with a glass porthole in the door.”
After Douglas was safely inside, he felt a “thump” against the door as it made its rise to his floor.
“A man’s face pushed up against the porthole window,” he wrote. “I was hysterical. That face, that moment, remains seared in my brain to this day.”
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And while Douglas admitted he initially blamed himself for his brush with abduction, he later noted, “It was part of the baggage that comes with having a famous father.”
Indeed, the 82-year-old previously opened up on the frightening experience after welcoming his eldest son with Zeta-Jones, sharing that it led he and his wife to increase their personal security after welcoming their child.
“It’s an episode I’ll never forget,” he told The New York Post in 2001. “We take precautions with both Dylan and ourselves. It’s important we live healthy lives, but that incident as a boy has certainly made me very conscious of the dangers around us.”
For a deeper look into Douglas’ family tree, keep reading…
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