Michael Douglas has called many places home in his 82 years, and the “Wall Street” star recently opened up about the places he’s lived since he was born.
In an Oct. 13 interview with the Wall Street Journal, the A-list actor chatted about some of the most formative residences he has spent time in, beginning with the one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment his parents moved into just after his birth in 1944.
The family would head to the West Coast just a year later, relocating to a property Douglas described as “a Craftsman house in Los Angeles.”
The move was due to his father—famed “Spartacus” actor Kirk Douglas, who died in February 2020 at the age of 103—being cast in a 1946 film called “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.”
Douglas went on to explain that his father became a “crazy man” in California, citing infidelity as the reason behind another cross-country shift.
“When I was 5, Mom had enough and she moved us back to New York, to an apartment on Central Park West with an alley view,” Douglas recalled.
While an alley-view apartment can be less desirable than better-lit units, it’s worth noting that Central Park West was a well-established address when Douglas lived there as a child—and remains so today.
It’s an Upper West Side locale with notable buildings that have been home to many distinguished residents, from Diane Keaton to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Douglas’ parents divorced in 1951, and he remembered seeing his father “only on movie screens, on holidays, or when he worked in New York.”
He also recounted an attempted kidnapping at age 8, where two “kidnappers came for” him, following Douglas into the basement of the building he lived in before he “managed to slip into the elevator” and escape.
It wasn’t long before Douglas found himself back on the West Coast, as his mother, Diana Douglas, “signed a film contract.” At 11, he “lived in a West Hollywood rental” until his mother’s contract ended in 1956, sending the family back to New York.
Later that year, she married writer-producer Bill Darrid, and the family moved to “a three-bedroom farmhouse in Westport, CT.”
For college, Douglas attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he majored in drama. After graduating in 1968, he returned to New York, where he worked in “off-Broadway plays” and “a string of TV shows.”
Today, Douglas and his wife, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, 57, split their “time between homes in New York and Spain’s Mallorca island, overlooking the Mediterranean.”
The home has a storied past, with Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Habsburg purchasing it in 1867 and transforming it into a “magical” retreat he’d eventually name S’Estaca.
Douglas and his first wife, Diandra Luker, purchased the Spanish estate for $3.5 million in 1990. The couple split in 1990, after 22 years of marriage, and initially agreed on a six-months on, six-months off arrangement for residing in the sprawling home.
They spent a few years attempting to offload the property, which includes a main house and five apartments. The home was listed for $60 million in 2014, then later drastically reduced to $32.5 million. At one point, Douglas even narrated a video of the home in an effort to sell.
Douglas and Zeta-Jones, who wed in 2000, bought Luker out of her share of the property in 2021.
“It was very uncomfortable sharing the property with my ex-wife, Diandra,” Douglas told local newspaper Ultima Hora in 2021. “Six months for each of us wasn’t very pleasant for anyone.”
It was in that interview that Douglas opened up about the more than three decades he’s spent residing in Mallorca part time.
“I love coming back to Mallorca. I’ve been coming for over 30 years, and I’ve learned over time that ‘Happy wife, happy life.’ Catherine, my wife, is very happy here,” he shared. “Even more so now that we no longer share the house with my first wife, Diandra. She feels much more comfortable now. She’s decorating the house her way.”
Most recently, Douglas told the Journal that he and Zeta-Jones appreciate the expansive property for its tranquil location.
“We love being surrounded by nature and our serene view and privacy,” he said.
He also revealed the house contains a Trackman, which he uses for his “daily workout” of hitting golf balls with a video setup in the wine cellar, which “doubles as a home theater.”
His favorite spot in the home, however, is a “fuschia armchair next to an open window facing the sea,” where he enjoys reading.
The couple also have a gorgeous historical mansion in Hudson, known as Longmeadow, which they have been trying to sell for two years. The eight-bedroom, 10.5-bathroom home was listed for $12 million in 2024 and reduced to $9.75 million in March of this year.
The estate was built in 1929 and offers sweeping views of the Hudson River. With 11,600 square feet of interior living space, the home is situated on a 12-acre lot in a premier community in New York’s Hudson Valley.
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