Movie Stars, Crystal Meth, Sex, Booze and Cocaine - How Kirk, Michael and Cameron Douglas Have Managed Fame

When the obituaries for Michael Douglas and his son Cameron Douglas come to be written, the epithet "Like father, like son" may be appropriate in both cases.

"The history of second-generation actors isn't great in our industry," says Kirk Douglas's fabulously successful son, speaking to Vanity Fair in 2010 of his own struggle against Kirk Douglas's fame and his own son's struggle against his. Michael Douglas famously turned his situation around of course, to emerge from the blinding spotlight of Kirk Douglas's film successes - Champion, Lonely Are the Brave, Paths of Glory, and Spartacus - and forge his own career with Romancing the Stone, The War of the Roses, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, Basic Instinct and Disclosure.

Michael's son, Cameron Douglas, has not known the same success however. In early 2010 he faced sentencing for drug smuggling. A possible ten year sentence was on the cards.

His father will understand his problems. At the height of his career, Michael became an alcoholic addiction and broke his family up. He could easily have gone the same route as his half-brother Eric, Kirk's other son who tried his hand at acting and died of a drug overdose in 2004.

His dad, Kirk, however gave him a helping hand in the form of Ken Kesey's classic story One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Owning the rights, he asked Michael to produce the movie and at 31 Michael Douglas won himself an Oscar for best picture with an unforgettable film starring the up and coming Jack Nicholson.

Michael's father, Kirk, had struggled out of real poverty, selling food to mill workers and delivering newspapers. In 1943 he married Bermudan actress Diana Dill, later abandoning her and his sons Michael and Joel to seek fame in Hollywood.

"He was a very intense, talented survivalist," says Michael. He soon got used to seeing his father only on special occasions and understood much later that "he was consumed with...making something of himself."

For Michael, trying to break into acting in New York in the 60s, the burden of being Kirk Douglas's son was immense. Once he had the Cuckoo's Nest under his belt though he was able to star in Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile and later, in the 80s, Fatal Attraction and Wall Street.

His personal life was a casualty of his success however and his marriage to Diandra Luker, a diplomat's daughter, broke down amid accusations of his repeated adultery and being an inadeqaute father to his son, Cameron.

It was only in 1998 that Michael Douglas felt ready to commit to marriage and fatherhood again. At the Deauville film festival that year he met 29-year-old Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones for whom he already had carried a torch. Within 10 minutes of meeting her it's said he told her he wanted to father her children. In 2000 they married to a chorus of scepticism about the 25-year age difference, his film dynasty family and her ambition. But this time Michael Douglas planned to devote time and energy to his young family. He put his kids before his film career and also tried to help his son Cameron, already in trouble with drugs, by asking him to produce It Runs in the Family. In doing this, he was exactly replicating the opportunity his father Kirk had given him when he was struggling to get a break in the film industry. The movie, which came out in 2003, starred Kirk Douglas as patriarch, his ex-wife Diana as his wife, son Michael as a philandering, liberal lawyer and Cameron as the druggy so in trouble with the law. The film had good potential but wasn't a great success and Cameron proved unable to build on the opportunity Michael gave him. The result is that while Michael Douglas was an Oscar winner at 31, Cameron faces a decade in jail at the same age.

But if their relationship is truly a question of 'like father like son' there may be more positive scenes to come in the story of this film dynasty. When Kirk Douglas had a stroke in 1996, five years after a helicopter crash which could have killed him, he decided to make "an audit" of his life. One of the things he wanted to do was get closer to his son Michael. In 2010, at 93 and 65, father and son were reported to be closer than they had ever been before. As Michael promoted his new film Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps, reprising the role of the ruthless Gordon Gecko, he may have reflected on his own comment that Kirk Douglas had long had the motto "Career First". Finally Kirk had devoted time to his son Michael. And finally Michael was devoting time to Cameron too. With Cameron facing a long spell in jail, Michael Douglas may well have been hoping that his own success after alcoholism and divorce really does run in the family and that Cameron, too, will turn his life around, "like father like son."