Cameron Douglas has had many brushes with the law and the longest one led to an almost seven-year prison sentence, but his father stayed by him and helped him as he tried to turn his life around.
Veteran actors Kirk Douglas and Michael Douglas are legends in Hollywood. Living up to them could have been hard for any child. Being born into the Douglas family may have come with perks but it doesn't mean that life was easy for any of the successors. Cameron Douglas, Michael's eldest child with his first wife, was born into movie royalty but growing up in the shadow of these two iconic men put a lot of pressure on him. And reportedly, he found it hard to cope with it. Not at first, anyway.
Cameron has faced a difficult life, including spending almost eight years in a maximum-security prison because of the bad choices he made. The decisions he made almost broke his relationship with his father and his family, but Michael stayed beside him even through the toughest times. Now, they are slowly trying to mend their relationship.
"A lot of the anger that I felt was really towards myself because I was failing at making him proud of me," Cameron recalled in his 2019 memoir, Long Way Home (via The New York Times). "There was nothing anybody could do to get through to me at a certain point," he said, referring to his lowest point in life.
The 40-year-old shared the screen with his father while speaking to ABC News' Diane Sawyer, where he opened up his dark days. Michael, 75, shared one of his deepest fears during the episode when he said, "I did not think that you were going to make it." Sawyer called it a "miracle" that Cameron was still well and healthy, after years of severe substance abuse.
He was only 13 when he first started smoking pot, but that became a gateway drug for him. In his book, Cameron Douglas wrote that he was "playing a game of chicken" with his life. By 2004, his father saw him with only "concern and sadness and frustration" in his eyes and their conversations were "usually a tense interaction about money or the latest way I've disappointed him," according to NickiSwift.
The 40-year-old spoke about the difficult moment when his father decided to stop supporting him. While to Cameron, Michael's words seemed "heartbreaking", the father thought he was making the right decision. "You were going to kill somebody, or you were going to get killed," Michael said to his son during the interview with Sawyer. "We had reached a point where I thought I was gonna lose him, based on everything I'd seen."
He was arrested in 2009 for drug possession at a New York hotel, which led to an almost decade-long prison sentence, according to New York Times. He has been out since 2016 and is long past his "demented death wish." Now, he's turned into a man who is thankful for what he has. He realizes that "99.5 percent of the people don’t have the opportunities that I had when I came home." So, he wrote the book to tell his story of pain and struggle.
Of the interview he did with Michael and Sawyer, he told Good Morning America, "Seeing my family, my father and I doing that segment, was actually really healing for us. We were talking about things that we would never talk about, just him and I together. And so that was a beautiful thing that came out of that."
He is also the father of one. He welcomed his daughter, Lua Izzy Douglas on December 18, 2017, with his girlfriend, Brazilian actress and yoga instructor Viviane Thibes, according to Daily Mail.
Michael, a proud grandfather, had said, "We’re all ecstatic about baby Lua. Dylan and Carys love being an aunt and uncle and we’re so happy to be her Bubba and Zeze," referring to himself and wife Catherine.
References:
https://www.nickiswift.com/171801/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-michael-douglas-son/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/books/cameron-douglas-long-way-home.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xP4Jt7qP7k&feature=youtu.be&t=522
