Michael Douglas to Be Honored with the Palme d’Or at This Year’s Cannes Film Festival

Michael Douglas Set To Receive Prestigious Honor at Cannes

Academy Award winning actor, Michael Douglas, is going to be awarded the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Michael Douglas will be receiving a Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s upcoming Cannes Film Festival. On May 16th, the Oscar winner will be presented with this very noble honor. It will be the 76th Cannes Film Festival and Douglas is certainly very deserving of this honor.

As Kirk Douglas’s son, Michael Douglas, rose to fame in the 1970’s but it was in the 1980’s that he starred in some true Hollywood box-office blockbusters. Romancing the Stone was released in the mid-80’s (1984) and proved Douglas had a knack for comedy. He even co-starred with his female lead from that picture, Kathleen Turner, once again five years later with the darkly comical surprise hit, The War of the Roses. In 1995, Michael Douglas played the President of the United States in Rob Reiner’s great movie, The American President.

It was in motion picture thrillers that Douglas found his greatest success as a leading man at the box-office (that’s not counting Marvel films). Fatal Attraction from 1987 was a zeitgeist film. In the movie, he played a married man who cheated on his wife with a possessive, psychotic woman played by Glenn Close. It redefined the way people saw extramarital affairs and served as a warning as to what not to do when happily married. Audiences lined up in droves to see it and liked what they saw judging from the film’s “A” CinemaScore grade. Five years later, Douglas and Sharon Stone steamed up the screen with the hugely successful suspense-filled hit, Basic Instinct. Five years after that, Douglas starred in David Fincher’s twisty thriller, The Game.

When Michael Douglas won his Academy Award for Best Actor playing the legendary investor Gordon Gekko in 1987’s Wall Street, the actor found one of his most popular characters and even replayed him in the sequel from 2010, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The sequel didn’t fare as well from a critical standpoint but was a welcome return to form for Douglas as he was re-playing a character that is one of the most memorable of all-time.

Many audiences loved Douglas when he played a seemingly ordinary guy who had enough with “the system” in 1993’s intense drama, Falling Down. More recently, Douglas has done Ant-Man films and, before that, he played in 2013’s Steven Soderbergh picture, Behind the Candelabra, a Liberace biopic.

It is only fitting for an actor of Douglas’s caliber to take home the Palme d’Or. As an actor, he brought a sense of dignity and respect to almost every character he played. He’s even done lighter fare such as the Owen Wilson comedy from 2007, You, Me and Dupree. The Cannes Film Festival will honor Douglas with his award on the opening night of the festival which will run through May 27th.

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