Michael Douglas: Acting on Instinct by Michael Douglas, John Parker Page B

runner at that point. I said I thought he had the potential for a great future but he needed
     experience. He needed the solid grounding that hard work – and it is hard – a series would give him. I reckoned that in five
     years’ time, after a long run in a television series, he would be mature enough to get some feature roles.’
    When Michael arrived at Martin’s office, Karl Malden was there too. The meeting went well and, though Martin tested a number
     of other actors, he eventually settled on Michael Douglas – a decision aided by Malden’s own liking and support for the son
     of his old friend. They went into production almost immediately with a two-hour pilot; it was shown in 1972, and did so well
     in the ratings that the series was up and running – and set for a long-term future. Even so, Michael remained nervous about
     it.
    Some snooty looks were cast in the direction of both Malden and Douglas for going over to television. Michael would admit
     that he would wake up in the middle of the night arguing with himself. ‘If I go into television, I’m finished. That’s it.’
     Then he would try to set down the alternatives and find he was staring at a blank page.
    The series turned out to be especially important to him. It can now be identified as a career-shaping period of his life,
     better than anything he had experienced so far. Working alongside Karl Malden was like being provided with his own personal
     tutor in the craft of acting.
    Malden was one of Kirk’s earliest friends in the business. They had met in summer stock around New York in the late 1930s
     when Kirk had newly graduated from St Lawrence University. Malden went on to join that rare breed of screen people who deservedly
     won the title of ‘actor’s actor’. He was one of the major exponents of The Method, learned at the Actors’ Studio in New York;
     other actors grounded in The Method included Marlon Brando, John Garfield, Maureen Stapleton and Montgomery Clift. ‘I absolutely
     adored Karl,’ Maureen told the author. ‘He was a brilliant actor, and entirely in the modern mould. There was also no one
     better for a young kid like Michael to work with and learn from.’
    Malden worked with some of the great innovators in the theatre and cinema in the late 1940s and 1950s. When one of his own
     mentors, the director Elia Kazan, reproduced his smash-hit Broadway production
A Streetcar Named Desire
for the big screen, Malden, already a star of half a dozen decent movies, won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for that
     year of1951 and established himself as one of America’s leading character actors.
    In a career punctuated by many superb roles in more than fifty films, notably
On the Waterfront
,
Baby Doll
and
Hotel
, Malden’s distinctive sharp and hurried style, coupled with his absolutely rigid professionalism, was an open textbook to
     an emerging talent like Douglas’s. In fact, it was just what he needed.
    Malden, known as a generous actor who was as concerned about the work of his colleagues as his own, never put on the big-star
     treatment that might be expected of an actor coming from the major league of Hollywood into a television series. His relationship
     with Douglas was, from the outset, the best Michael could have hoped for. Malden was the star of the show, but he allowed
     Douglas the space to develop his own character. The role Michael created was that of Malden’s partner, Lieutenant Steve Keller,
     fictionally billed as the youngest man to achieve that rank in the San Francisco force. ‘We were partners in every sense of
     the word,’ said Douglas. ‘The role written for me was not just that of a sidekick, who drove the boss and answered his telephones.
     I was the precocious college-educated student of criminology, while Karl’s character never went beyond high school and learned
     his job on the street. It allowed a good deal of creativity on my part and Karl respected that, and never tried to crowd