Life Of Michael Douglas

Film critic and author Rob Edelman points out similarities in many of Douglas's roles, writing that he "has come to personify the contemporary, Caucasian middle-to-upper-class American male who finds himself the brunt of female anger because of real or imagined sexual slights." These themes of male victimization are seen in films such as Fatal Attraction (1987), War of the Roses, (1989), Falling Down (1993), and Disclosure, (1994). For his characters in films such as these, "any kind of sexual contact with someone other than his mate and the mother of his children is destined to come at a costly price."
However, Douglas is also able to play powerful characters with stronger dominating personalities equally well: as Gekko, in both versions of Wall Street, he acted the role of a "greedy yuppie personification of the Me generation," convinced that "greed is good;" in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, he played an idealistic soldier of fortune; in The Star Chamber (1983), he was a court judge fed up with an inadequate legal system, leading him to become involved with a vigilante group; and in Black Rain (1989), he proved he could also play a Stallone-like action hero as a New York City cop.