Michael Douglas was recently appointed a messenger of Peace. He seemed an odd choice, this man who has made a career out of playing adventurers, gun-toting cops, even the odd psycho, and whose films have stirred up a tornado of controversy. At first, even Douglas saw it as the height of incongruity. ``I'm not Audrey Hepburn. I've made some pretty extraordinary movies.''

Then he thought again. What he does as actor is one thing and what he does ``as a citizen of this planet'' another, he concluded. He was profoundly grateful to Kofi Annan for accepting that. So why can't we?

It's a fair point -- not least because Douglas, now 53, has gone through immense personal and professional changes. He talks of mid-life rebirth -- ``the mid-life crisis was several years ago''.

And there's always been more to the man than just an actor. As a first-time producer, he won an Oscar for One FlewOver The Cuckoo's Nest. He brought out The China Syndrome, a film about a nuclear accident, three weeks before Three Mile Island.

Nuclear disarmament -- and gun control -- are his special areas of concern at the UN. ``Do you realise how many warheads are still in a Cold War state of alert?'' he asks passionately.

Contradictions are Douglas's speciality. He was in San Francisco at the time of Haight Ashbury -- ``I was a hippy'' - but his films of the Eighties and early Nineties were a one-man reproach to political correctness: Romancing The Stone, Wall Street, Falling Down, Disclosure and, above all, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

``After the Flower Generation and the Me Generation, we were in the No Generation,'' he said after Basic Instinct, a film that outraged gays and prudes alike with Sharon Stone's crotch-flashing depiction of a bisexual killer. ``No meat, no sex, no drinking, no smoking, no fats. I just felt this repression and I wanted to do alustful, dark, evil movie.''

Fatal Attraction, meanwhile, infuriated countless women as Glenn Close took bloody revenge on the married man who loved and left her, played by Douglas. One critic commented that the film ``will appeal strongly to those who think women should be kept on a short leash''. ``That part could have been me,'' Douglas said.

In 1992, Douglas's turbulent marriage to Spanish-born Diandra had come to a crisis, after which he checked into a clinic to be treated for alcohol dependence -- and sex addiction. He went into rehab to save his marriage, and wound up, he said, saving himself instead. ``Men these days have difficulty finding out their role on the planet, other than as worker bees.''

The 20-year-marriage finally ended with an amicable divorce last autumn. Even without the divorce, there were plenty of tough moments in the past few years. His stepfather died, and his assistant. He saw his son go through his own drink problem.

But Douglas seems fine, though perhaps a littledistracted. He talks about family, about Clinton (``I don't believe committing adultery makes someone a bad person''). He doesn't say much about his new movie. A Perfect Murder is based on the same play from which Hitchcock made Dial M For Murder. Directed by Andrew Davis of The Fugitive, it suffered teething troubles, but went on to make more than $70 million in the US. It is unlikely to set critics' hearts beating.

After so much turmoil in his life, you might expect Douglas to be ready for a break. Far from it. There's a sports movie he's developing, which would star Rene Russo; The Wonder Boys with Curtis Hanson; Still Life with Meryl Streep, in which he'll play a grandad.

But, whichever way his career's headed, Douglas always seems in tune with the spirit of the times. And what's fashionable now is to show you have a life beyond the movies.

The Observer News Service