Douglas's body of work shows that he has built a successful career around a collection of risky characters, some of whom were downright unappealing. Even when he was portraying the romantic hero Jack Colton in the 1984 hit Romancing the Stone and its sequel, Jewel of the Nile, he did so with a self-deprecating, recalcitrant smirk. It was almost as if he had to constantly argue with himself to make the correct heroic moves.
His Academy Award-winning performance in Oliver Stone's 1987 hit Wall Street showed a seductive, arrogant Gordon Gecko, a devil in a custom-made suit whose amorality spoke to that part within each of us that secretly resonates with his ice-cold, bottom-line heart. That same year he played the husband who succumbs to a steamy, adulterous affair with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Six years later, he was the victim of sexual harassment at the hands of Demi Moore in Disclosure.
We were saddened when we realized that there was most definitely an ice pick somewhere in detective Nick Curran's future in Basic Instinct. The film Falling Down cast Douglas as a disenfranchised, downsized defense department worker avenging the wrongs of the world during a day-long gun-toting rampage across Los Angeles. He played The Game as successful investment banker Nicholas Van Orton, who had to lose everything he thought he had before he could find his way back to his own heart and avoid committing suicide like his father. Even in Rob Reiner's romantic comedy, The American President, Douglas created a man who could run our country, romance a woman and conduct a sexual relationship in the White House. Of course, President Andrew Shepherd was a widower.
