1. Michael Kirk Douglas
Net worth: $300 million
Michael Kirk Douglas is an American actor and producer. Douglas’s career includes a diverse range of films in independent and blockbuster genres, for which he has received a number of accolades, both competitive and honorary. These awards include the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment” and the AFI Life Achievement Award, which “honor[s] an individual whose career in motion pictures or television has greatly contributed to the enrichment of American culture.
After reprising his Romancing the Stone role as Jack Colton in the 1985 sequel The Jewel of the Nile, which he also produced, and along with appearing in the musical A Chorus Line (1985) and the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction (1987), Douglas received widespread acclaim for his portrayal of amoral corporate raider Gordon Gekko in the Oliver Stone-directed drama Wall Street, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He reprised the role in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Douglas’s subsequent film roles included: Black Rain (1989); The War of the Roses (1989); Basic Instinct (1992); The American President (1995); The Game (1997); Traffic and Wonder Boys (2000); Solitary Man (2009); and Ant-Man (2015).
In 2013, Douglas’s performance as Liberace in the HBO biopic, Behind the Candelabra, received universal critical acclaim, and the actor won numerous accolades for his role, including Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Apart from his career in the film industry, Douglas has received notice for his humanitarian and political activism, as well as media attention for his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones, and his tongue cancer diagnosis. Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actors Kirk Douglas (1916–) and Diana Dill (1923–2015).
His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. Douglas’s uncle was politician Sir Nicholas Bayard Dill, and Douglas’s maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill (named after his own grandfather, a sea captain who took the Bermudian-built barque Sir George F. Seymour from Bermuda to Ireland in thirteen days in March, 1858. Douglas is a U.S. citizen by birth in the United States and has British Citizenship with Bermudian Status through his mother’s birth in Bermuda.