Michael Douglas has opened up about the tension that followed his affair with Kathleen Turner during the making of Romancing the Stone. Speaking at a talk about his memoir, One Helluva Ride, at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, the 82-year-old actor said he feared his co-star had turned against him by the time they reunited for the sequel.
The romance took place while Douglas was married to his first wife, Diandra Luker, and it ended when he chose to return to his family. He told the audience that he went back to Diandra, had a child and brought the on-screen romance to a close. In the memoir he describes Turner as smart, funny and sexy, with a deep and sultry voice that became her trademark. The relationship has only become public around 40 years after it happened.
The difficulty came with The Jewel of the Nile, the follow-up to the 1984 hit directed by Robert Zemeckis, which had earned an Academy Award nomination and two Golden Globes. 20th Century Fox commissioned the sequel, and both actors were contractually bound to make it. Turner, who reportedly found the script terrible and was more interested in The Money Pit, hired the lawyer Roy Cohn to try to get out of the commitment. Fox and Douglas threatened to sue her for 25 million dollars for breach of contract.
Douglas prevailed, but he admitted the victory came with a worry. He said he thought he now had to make the sequel with a woman who “hates my guts.” In the end, the collaboration went better than he expected. He praised Turner for stepping in to help improve the script, and the 1985 film became a box office success, although it divided critics. The pair worked together again on Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses in 1989 and reunited roughly three decades after Romancing the Stone on The Kominsky Method.
Turner, 72, responded to the renewed attention with good humour. In a statement she said: “Good heavens what a fuss about something 40 years ago!” She added that she loves Douglas and is looking forward to reading the book. The memoir has put one of Hollywood’s best-known on-screen partnerships back in the spotlight, with both actors now treating the story of their brief romance and the legal stand-off that followed as part of a long and mostly friendly working history.
