Michael Douglas reveals Basic Instinct affair was with Jeanne Tripplehorn, not Sharon Stone
Basic Instinct fans long assumed Michael Douglas's real-life romance was with co-star Sharon Stone, but he reveals in his new memoir that it was Jeanne Tripplehorn.
And before the book went to print, Douglas insisted, he made sure she was on board.
Speaking with Page Six, the actor said Tripplehorn knew what was coming. “I talked to her before I put it in the book,” he said. In his words, “she was fine” with it.
In his news memoir, One Helluva Ride, the 82-year-old reveals that he began a passionate fling with Tripplehorn, now 63, while they were filming basic Instinct. When the film came out, plenty of people assumed his real-life romance was with Sharon Stone, thanks the pair’s sizzling on-screen chemistry.
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“The truth is, I fell very hard for Jeanne despite our nearly 20-year age difference,” wrote the Oscar winner, who was married to first wife Diandra Luker at the time. “In fact, I was ready to officially leave my wife for Jeanne. I was crazy about her.”
But Douglas says he knew that walking away from this wife and straight into another serious relationship would be the ‘worst thing’ for him.
“My relationship with Jeanne lasted through production, then we went our separate ways,” he wrote. “But I will always think of her as an amazing actress and a truly terrific woman that I was very fortune to spend time with.”
Both of them went on to marry in 2000. Douglas divorced Luker and wed Catherine Zeta-Jones, now 57, while Tripplehorn married actor Leland Orser, 66.
The 1992 movie is considered a trailblazing erotic neo-noir, which sees hard-boiled San Francisco detective Nick Curran, played by Douglas, investigating the brutal ice-pick murder of a rock star. He becomes sucked into the world of, and seduced by, crime novelist and prime suspect Catherine Tramell, played by Stone.
As Curran is pulled into Tramell’s web of sexually-fuelled deceit, the film explores themes of obsession, moral ambiguity and manipulation – with a controversial and iconic interrogation scene that has since become a landmark of Hollywood history.
He hasn’t seen Tripplehorn ‘in years’, Douglas told Page Six, through he still calls what they had ‘important’,
“These things are not just simply about having affairs. They’re important friendships and working together. She was fine. She’s been married for a long time,” he said.
The memoir doesn’t stop there. Douglas also opens up about his affair with Kathleen Turner during the making of Romancing the Stone, his struggle with cocaine addiction, life with Zeta-Jones and his fight with cancer.
Michael D. Carroll