Like father, like son. Michael Douglas stepped into his father’s shoes last Thursday when he received the 37th annual American Film Institute Life Achievement Award; Kirk Douglas received the same award in 1991.

The echoes don’t end there. Like his father, Michael has made a name for himself both as an actor and filmmaker. Both either appeared in or produced some of the most memorable films of their times; Spartacus, Champion and Lust for Life for the dad and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fatal Attraction and Wall Street for the son.

Douglas made a handful of movies before he became a TV star in the 1970s with the hit detective series The Streets of San Francisco, with Karl Malden. While working on Streets, he produced 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won the best picture Oscar. He also won a best actor Oscar for 1987’s Wall Street.

These days Douglas is still boyishly handsome, sporting the same scruffy, if grayer, hair. He and his second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and their two young children, Dylan and Carys, live in Bermuda. Douglas spent most of his formative years in Connecticut with his mother, actress Diana Dill, and his stepfather. “I was very fortunate that my mother remarried a wonderful guy, and Kirk is the first guy to acknowledge that,” he says. “I would come and visit him, but I missed some of that craziness.”

Douglas says his priorities have changed since marrying Zeta-Jones and the birth of his two young children—he also has a 30-year-old son, actor Cameron Douglas, from his first marriage. Though he continues to work—he had a supporting role in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past; starring roles in two upcoming dramas, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and Solitary Man; and is scheduled to reunite with director Oliver Stone on the sequel to Wall Street—Douglas is pacing his projects. His family comes first now. “The AFI award makes me think how old I will be when my daughter is 18,” he said.

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