(JTA) — Actor-producer Michael Douglas celebrated his 50th year in show business with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near the one for his screen legend father Kirk Douglas, now 101.
Douglas, 74, was accompanied by his father — best known for the 1960 gladiator movie “Spartacus” — and the younger Douglas’ actress wife Catherine Zeta-Jones.
An Academy Award winner playing Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street,” Michael Douglas has appeared in more than 60 films and television shows, including the 1970s police series “The Streets of San Francisco,” psychological thrillers “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct,” and more recently the Marvel comic book movie “Ant-Man.”
Michael Douglas, who is Jewish, is also a film producer, winning an Oscar for the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and producing dozens of independent movies.
“I have been lucky enough to be part of classic Hollywood and new Hollywood,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
Douglas said he was honored to join the more than 2,600 men and women represented on the Walk of Fame.
“They are people who passionately cared about what they did and about entertaining people around the world,” he said.
In 2015, Douglas accepted the $1 million Genesis Prize, known as the “Jewish Nobel,” for his commitment to Jewish values and the Jewish people. He reconnected to his Judaism at the age of 70.
Kirk Douglas was born in the upstate New York town of Amsterdam as Issur Danielovitch, the son of an illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrant who supported his family of six daughters and one son as a rag picker and junkman. The actor had his bar mitzvah at the age of 83.
