Michael Douglas, Honorary Palme d’or of the 76th Festival de Cannes

32nd Festival de Cannes, time to walk up those red carpet Steps.  Michael Douglas arrived for the first time on the Croisette. He was with actors Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon, as well as director James Bridges for the presentation of The China Syndrome. Thirteen years later, in 1992, the sulphurous Basic Instinct, by Paul Verhoeven was presented in Competition. Shaking up the thriller genre, the film was the talk of the Croisette: it propelled Sharon Stone to the rank of international icon and confirmed the power of Michael Douglas’ talent. In 1993, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down was presented in Competition, for the American actor’s third participation at the Festival.

He reappeared on the Steps only 20 years later, with Behind the Candelabra by Steven Soderbergh. Transformed, moving and at the apex of his art, Michael Douglas played the famous singer and pianist Liberace. But his history with the Festival de Cannes began long before all this, through his father, Kirk Douglas, a lover of France and its cinema. The latter had marked the history of the Festival by presiding over the Jury in 1980. With the strength of his conviction and his character, he awarded the Palme d’Or to Akira Kurosawa and to Bob Fosse for Kagemusha and All That Jazz.

Michael Douglas has inherited his father’s love for motion pictures, the kind of love that gives faith in the power of a film and spurs the desire to defend it body and soul. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Miloš Forman is proof of this; it is his first production in collaboration with Saul Zaentz and it gave him 9 Oscar nominations and the film was awarded Best Picture in 1975.

Michael Douglas has worked as an actor with the greatest in the industry, such as Robert Zemeckis in Romancing the Stone (1984), Ridley Scott in Black Rain (1989) or Barry Levinson in Disclosure (1994). With Oliver Stone, he won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1987 for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko, a greedy New York broker in Wall Street. The sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was screened Out of Competition at the 63rd Festival de Cannes.

In addition to his valuable contribution to cinema, Michael Douglas advocates multiple causes. In his capacity as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, he has been committed to nuclear disarmament across the world since 1998 and he has also been a longstanding advocate of gun control in the United States.

The Festival de Cannes is honored to pay a vibrant tribute to the career of Michael Douglas and to welcome him at the Palais du Festival.

To complete the tribute to Michael Douglas, a previously unreleased documentary by Amine Mestari, produced by Folamour and soon to be broadcast on Arte, will be shown on the Festival site for two days, from Sunday May 14 at 6pm to Tuesday May 16 at 6pm.