Michael Douglas says taking time apart from Catherine Zeta-Jones taught him how much he needed her.
The 82-year-old actor opened up about the couple’s brief 2013 separation during a recent interview with Diane Sawyer, 80, while promoting his new memoir, “One Helluva Ride.” Douglas, who married Zeta-Jones, 57, in 2000, traced the split to a crushing convergence of personal crises that hit them simultaneously.
At the time, Douglas was in remission from his stage four cancer battle, while Zeta-Jones was seeking treatment for her bipolar disorder. The “Basic Instinct” star explained in his memoir that after returning from vacation, the pair “decided to take some time apart” after they “just had gone through a period where a number of challenges came at us all at once.”
“We still loved each other immensely, but we needed to make sure that being married was the right thing for all of us,” Douglas wrote, calling the separation “incredibly difficult” for both actors.
The “Wall Street” Oscar winner, who shares son Dylan, 26, and daughter Carys, 23, with Zeta-Jones, wrote that he “never gave up hope” they would reconcile. Their paths kept crossing at school functions, drop-offs and extracurricular activities for their children. Those encounters gradually revealed what the distance had made plain.
“As Catherine and I were seeing each other more surrounding the kids—school functions, drop-offs, extracurricular activities—we realized we both missed each other enormously,” Douglas wrote in the memoir. “Taking time away helped reignite the spark that had brought us together.”
During the Sawyer interview, Douglas distilled the lesson into simpler terms. “How much I loved her. How much I missed her. How much laughs we had together,” he told the veteran anchor.
The couple’s separation lasted roughly a year before they reunited in 2014. Douglas told Sawyer that preserving the marriage ultimately required both partners to evolve. “And sometimes I think it’s just good to kind of call time out and just talk as two human beings,” he said.
He expanded on that transformation in his book, emphasizing that their bond ran deeper than surface conflict. “Catherine and I have a very intense, deep love for each other. And we love our kids dearly,” he wrote. “We worked hard to make sure they understood that this wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
The memoir’s candor extends to Douglas’s romantic history, including past secret affairs detailed in its pages. During an exclusive interview last week, he confirmed Zeta-Jones was in the middle of reading the book.
But the “Wednesday” actress struck a more ambivalent tone during a recent “Today” show appearance. She admitted she has been too busy to finish her husband’s memoir, offering a blunt explanation for her stalled progress.
“As much as I love my husband, when I’m tired at night, I have no intention of reading about him. At all,” she said.
She quickly pivoted to a plug for the general public. “But everyone else should [read it],” the “Chicago” star told the audience. “The book is called ‘One Helluva Ride,’ and I think everyone should hold on to their cowboy hats, because I think it is.”
Douglas and Zeta-Jones first met at the Deauville Film Festival in 1998, married two years later at New York’s Plaza Hotel, and have since become one of Hollywood’s most enduring couples despite their 25-year age gap and the highly publicized 2013 split that briefly threatened their union.
Douglas’s memoir “One Helluva Ride” is currently available from publishers.