Michael Douglas To Receive HFPA's Cecil B. DeMille Award At 61st Annual Golden Globe Awards to be Telecast Live on NBC on Jan. 25

Business Wire, Nov 17, 2003

Entertainment Editors

HOLLYWOOD--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2003

Michael Douglas has been selected as the recipient of the 2004 Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for his "outstanding contribution to the entertainment field," it was announced today at a morning press conference by Brittany Murphy.

The award, voted by the board of directors of the HFPA, will be presented to Douglas at the 61st Annual Golden Globe Awards, to be held Sunday, January 25, 2004 and telecast live on NBC (8-11 p.m. EST). The event will take place in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

Douglas received two Golden Globes; one as Best Actor (drama) for "Wall Street" and one as producer of the Golden-Globe winning Best Picture (drama) "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." He received four additional Golden Globe nominations; three as Best Actor for "Wonder Boys," "The American President" and "The War of the Roses"; and one for Best Television Actor (drama) for "The Streets of San Francisco."

He is the first-ever second generation Cecil B. DeMille honoree. His father, Kirk Douglas, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1968.

An actor with over thirty years of experience in theatre, film, and television, Michael Douglas branched out into independent feature production in 1975 with the Academy Award-winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Since then, as a producer and as an actor-producer, he has shown an uncanny knack for choosing projects that reflect changing trends and public concerns. Over the past twelve years, he has been involved in such controversial and politically influential motion pictures as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The China Syndrome" and such popular films as "Fatal Attraction" and "Romancing the Stone."

The son of Kirk and Diana Douglas, Michael was born in New Jersey. He attended the elite prepatory Choate School and spent his summers with his father on movie sets. Although accepted at Yale, Douglas attended the University of California, Santa Barbara.

After receiving his B.A. degree in 1968, Douglas moved to New York City to continue his dramatic training, studying at the American Place Theatre with Wynn Handman, and at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he appeared in workshop productions of Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and Thornton Wilder's "Happy Journey."

A few months after he arrived in New York, Douglas got his first big break when he was cast in the pivotal role of the free-spirited scientist who compromises his liberal views to accept a lucrative job with a high-tech chemical corporation in the CBS Playhouse production of Ellen M. Violett's drama, "The Experiment," which was televised nationwide on February 25, 1969.

Douglas' convincing portrayal won him the leading role in the adaptation of John Weston's controversial novel, "Hail, Hero!," which was the initial project of CBS's newly organized theatrical film production company, Cinema Center Films. Douglas starred as a well-meaning, almost saintly young pacifist determined not only to justify his beliefs to his conservative parents but also to test them under fire in the jungles of Indochina. His second feature, "Adam at 6 A.M." (1970) concerned a young man's search for his roots. Douglas next appeared in the film version of Ron Cowen's play "Summertree" (1971), produced by Kirk Douglas' Bryna Company, and then "Napoleon and Samantha" (1972), a sentimental children's melodrama from the Walt Disney studio.

In between film assignments, he worked in summer stock and off-Broadway productions, among them "City Scenes," Frank Gagliano's surrealistic vignettes of contemporary life in New York, John Patrick Shanley's short-lived romance "Love is a Time of Day" and George Tabori's "Pinkville," in which he played a young innocent brutalized by his military training. He also appeared in the made-for-television thriller, "When Michael Calls," broadcast by ABC-TV on February 5, 1972 and in episodes of the popular series "Medical Center" and "The FBI."

Impressed by Douglas' performance in a segment of "The FBI," producer Quinn Martin signed the actor for the part of Karl Malden's sidekick in the police series "The Streets of San Francisco," which premiered September of 1972 and became one of ABC's highest-rated prime-time programs in the mid-1970s. Douglas earned three successive Emmy Award nominations for his performance and he directed two episodes of the series.

During the annual breaks in the shooting schedule for "The Streets of San Francisco," Douglas devoted most of his time to his film production company, Big Stick Productions, Ltd., which produced several short subjects in the early 1970s. Long interested in producing a film version of Ken Kesey's grimly humorous novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Douglas purchased the movie rights from his father and began looking for financial backing. After a number of major motion picture studios turned him down, Douglas formed a partnership with Saul Zaentz, a record industry executive, and the two set about recruiting the cast and crew. Douglas still had a year to go on his contract for "The Streets of San Francisco," but the producers agreed to write his character out of the story so that he could concentrate on filming "Cuckoo's Nest."