One Helluva Ride (PB) - C-format

The explosive memoir from the Academy Award-winning actor and Hollywood legend! A boy lost in the shadow of his father's legacy. A gifted artist dismissed as just a "TV actor". A maverick who changed Hollywood and became a global movie star. Hollywood icon Michael Douglas tells the unfiltered story of his life for the first time. "I spent a significant portion of my career playing some version of the modern, flawed, American male. You'll see from these pages that it wasn't exactly a stretch for me." Beginning with his fractured childhood and a complex relationship with his superstar father, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas finally gives the full and uncensored account of a remarkable life that has spanned an extraordinary eight decades. One Helluva Ride reveals incredible behind-the-scenes stories, many of them never revealed before, with an unflinching honesty about his sometimes bad-boy life. Initially dismissed as just the handsome son of a legendary movie star, at age thirty-one he shook up Hollywood and stunned the world when he won his first Oscar for producing the five-time Academy Award-winning classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When they told him he would never be anything more than a "TV actor", he quit the hit series The Streets of San Francisco to become an international movie star, with a list of classic films that have grossed billions of dollars, winning a second Oscar for his performance as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Yet as Douglas's fame grew, so did his personal struggles. Here, for the first time, he recounts the full, unfiltered story of his turbulent first marriage; infidelity and affairs with some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood; his own serious struggle with alcohol, drugs and rehab; the heartbreaking fight to save his son from addiction; and his against-all-odds battle with cancer. Father, son, husband, actor, producer, brother and friend. This is the real, raw, deeply honest and vulnerable Michael Douglas you don't know.