Stone

Sunlight pours through a tiny stone window, causing the wooden floorboards to creak as they warm up. The sound of sheep’s bells filters in from a passing flock. The scent of baking bread mingles with smoke from the previous evening’s fire. I wake up feeling I’ve been transported back to another time – but in reality I’m in modern-day Albania.

I’m staying in a kulla, one of the traditional stone tower houses that are found throughout northern Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia. They once protected families during times of conflict and sheltered weary travellers on trade routes, before mostly falling into disrepair in the 20th century. A new long-distance trail developed by the Albanian Agritourism Association aims to return some of them to their former glory and give visitors a chance to discover a part of Albania almost untouched by tourism.

ACTING icon John Goodman says his dramatic weight loss hasn’t involved jabs, but that they would have been helpful in shedding the pounds.

The Hollywood star – known for sitcom Roseanne and movies The Big Lebowski and this year’s Tom Cruise flop Digger – has revealed his relationship with food had become “dangerous”, leading him to lose weight.

John, 74, has lost over 14 stone over the years, giving up booze, “forcing himself” to go to the gym, and undergoing stomach surgery.

Speaking to The Sunday Times’ Culture magazine, he spoke about his battle with alcohol, and how he treated food in the same way as he did booze.

“I was eating alcoholically – it was just something to up the ante.

“It was dangerous; my joints were shot from the weight I was carrying.”

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Asked whether he used weight loss jabs at all during his health journey – which started in 2007 after entering rehab, having started to drink behind-the-scenes on his acting projects – he admitted: “No, because it’s got to be co-ordinated with other things.

“But it would have been a godsend; they cut down on the addiction part and I understand it works for drinking as well.”

By 2023, he had dropped over 14 stone, but admitted: “I have to force myself [to the gym]. If it was just me, I’d skip it.”

John’s weight led to his need for two knee replacements, tipping the scales at 28.5 stone at his heaviest.

John’s size went hand-in-hand with his character on the sitcom Roseanne, in which he starred as Dan Conner, the husband of the titular character played by Rosanne Barr.

The show told the story of a working-class American family, with both Dan and Roseanne known for enjoying fast food and spending copious amounts of time on the couch.

The sitcom ran initially for nine seasons, from 1988 through 1997, before being rebooted in 2018 for one season (before writers killed off Rosanne’s character amid a real-life controversy, and continuing the show without her, rebranded as The Conners).

But between the show’s initial end, and the 2018 revival, John came to realise how his weight issues were causing problems in all areas of his life.

“It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating.

“It was life or death… it was time to stop.”

He shed the first 100lb by 2010, totally ditching sugar and working out six days a week with Mackie Shilstone, known as tennis star Serena Williams‘ trainer.

The PT also placed John on a Mediterranean diet, and he was tasked with taking between 10,000 to 12,000 steps per day, using a treadmill, an elliptical trainer and walking his dogs.

Portions were reduced and slowly he was eased into low-intensity workouts, as well as boxing.

John was in London in September for the premiere of Digger, Tom Cruise’s latest film, in which he played the President of the United States opposite Tom’s oil magnate, Digger Rockwell.

The vital moment comes a couple of hours into the walk. I drop down from a tussocky hill towards the village of Y Fron. There’s an abandoned slate-quarrying machine and a grassy track that suddenly emerges on the rim of a deep lake-filled crater. The water is the colour of an old bruise. Around the rim is a fence of lichen-crusty slates like gravestones. It’s a dark, brooding spectacle and totally unexpected. At that moment, I know that whoever designed this route knew what they were doing.

This is the Llwybr Llechi Eryri (Snowdonia Slate Trail), an 83-mile hike that follows a great loop around the national park, starting in Bangor and ending in Bethesda. It strings together a series of abandoned slate quarries with some of the finest riverside and mountain walking in the UK. I’m doing just three days, starting in Llanberis and heading to Betws-y-Coed via stops in Beddgelert and Llan Ffestiniog.

Beyond Y Fron village, I descend into my first quarry, and it proves to be a classic. This was once the Dorothea slate quarry, a vast abandoned complex of railways, cottages and chasms. I start exploring: tunnels, cuttings, huge looming stone towers like Maya temples, all overgrown with ash, birch and oak. What strikes me is the craftsmanship and precision in construction, each stone hand-fitted without mortar, all for workaday industrial buildings.

The quality of this slate was known from early times. Edward I is thought to have had his Welsh castles roofed with it, but industrial production began in the 1820s and peaked in the 1870s. Soon, there was a railway to Caernarfon and the area bristled with steam pumps, aerial cables and chains. The last-ever Cornish beam engine was installed to pump water from the deep pits, sucking up 10 gallons a second from 500ft down.

From here, the trail burrows eastwards into the Welsh mountains, until Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) appears on the horizon when it turns south, occasionally following the line of the Welsh Highland Railway all the way into Beddgelert, my first overnight stop. Named after a dog or a saint, depending on who you believe, this is a good base for hikers, having pubs, cafes, restaurants and outdoor gear shops.

The second day begins along a path combining the Slate Trail and the Cambrian Way, one of the grandees of the long-distance genre at 298 miles. I follow the route as it heads south along the River Glaslyn, with some spectacular sections on crags with the torrent below. We are getting along very nicely – so well, in fact, that I start to get footpath envy. When the Cambrian Way turns east, heading up the Matterhorn-shaped peak of Cnicht, I cannot resist. The weather forecast is bad, but the sun is out. If I pop over the peak, I can see how the two paths cross each other later.

Views of the Irish Sea open up as I climb, but there is an ominous black cloud approaching. As I reach the summit, a howling wind threatens to blow me off course. I face down the hailstones and get back to the Slate Trail, which now descends into Cwmorthin quarry. Not on the scale of Dorothea, Cwmorthin still seems epic today, dominated by vast heaps of spoiled stone – it took 10 tons to make 1 ton of marketable material. In the late 19th century, Cwmorthin was known locally as “the slaughterhouse” for its propensity to slay workers in fatal accidents. From here, the path runs down a desolate valley before dropping into Blaenau Ffestiniog, where I find a good cafe, Burrito Blasus, to fire me up the last miles into Llan Ffestiniog.

I stay in the Y Pengwern, a community-owned pub that has an excellent, friendly bar and basic rooms and food. Outside, a storm is buffeting the building, but the next day the rain has stopped and I begin with a rare treat: a magical trail beside the tumbling River Cynfal. Here, thunderous white spumes of water and dark powerful currents punch their way through a deep mossy gorge overhung by ancient fern-decked oaks. One of the midstream rock towers is said to have once been the “pulpit” of a magician called Huw Llwyd and, according to the 18th-century traveller and naturalist Thomas Pennant, his voice could be heard at night, ringing down the enchanted chasms.

As I climb higher, the forest dwindles and I emerge on a remote, wind-scoured upland of crags and bog. Even here, you can come across fragments of old quarry workings. In one abandoned cottage, a jacket still hangs on a nail behind the door, as if the occupant had just flounced out: “I’ve had enough. I’m off to America.” Many Welsh slate workers did head to the US, fed up with the poor pay and the repeated failure of strikes. In 1901, sympathetic workers in England sent a two-and-a-half ton Christmas pudding, which briefly lifted morale, but after violent clashes the landowner won, and many quarrymen emigrated.

I stop and brew some tea on my stove. I have not seen another soul all day, yet Yr Wyddfa, with all its crowds, is less than 10 miles away. This remote walk takes me to the top of the old tramway incline down to Rhiwbach quarry – an epic approach, descending to the old engine house. This place peaked in the 1860s, and being so isolated, the miners lived in barracks, some of which remain.

Farther down the valley, I spot peregrine falcons nesting close to a tumbling waterfall, above the little village of Cwm Penmachno. A few miles on, the church of St Tudclud contains an astonishing collection of inscribed stones, including the Carausius Stone. This is thought to be the gravestone of a commander of the Roman empire, who pulled off a coup d’etat in AD286, making himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul for seven years before his assassination.

Approaching Betws-y-Coed, the path joins the River Conwy, first singled out as a beauty spot in the 17th century, long before the Romantic poets seized on the idea. For me, it’s the finale to this fine route, but the path continues and I’ll be back soon for more mountains of slate and spectacular riverside walking.

The trip was provided by Walkers’ Britain & Europe, which offers Hiking the Snowdonia Slate Trail as a seven-day self-guided 83-mile walk, including six nights’ accommodation, breakfast, luggage transfers, digital app with tour information and navigations, and emergency hotline from £890pp, departing daily from April to October

Movie stars are an endangered species. They still exist, sure. Their beautiful faces still fill 50-foot screens, beaming down on us. Yet, there is a shortage of, say, Michael Douglas. A man who, over the span of decades, played an American president, a troubled detective, and a Wall Street tycoon so convincingly that the FBI recruited the actor to do a PSA for investment bankers about the perils of financial fraud.

The night before I meet Michael Douglas on Zoom, I have a hard time sleeping. I want to be well-rested before I meet the leading man — perhaps one of the last leading men from an era in Hollywood that felt limitless. What do I mean by that? He’ll tell you. His new memoir details his movie-making career as a prolific producer and actor, along with his affair with his “Romancing the Stone” co-star Kathleen Turner, mudslides in Mexico, snorting cocaine with O.J. Simpson, encounters with Princess Diana and screaming matches with Paul Verhoeven that end in blood. In short: the life of a movie star.

“People say to me: Michael Douglas. When I see your name, I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be good,” Michael Douglas says.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

Halfway through our conversation, something unanticipated happens: Douglas reveals that he doesn’t quite see himself as a movie star. After gentle pushback, he elaborates. Instead, Douglas sees himself as a chameleon.

“People say to me: Michael Douglas. When I see your name, I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be good,” he says.

He’s speaking from his home in New York. Behind him is a moody 18th-century Orientalist painting, its scene too indistinct for me to make out. His smiling face — which, like most American moviegoers, I had watched 50 feet tall in the dark — glows with warmth even on my laptop screen. It seems abnormal even to witness him in miniature.

To be clear: Michael Douglas is a movie star, whether or not he wants to cop to it over Zoom. It’s in his blood. His father, Kirk Douglas — born Issur Danielovitch to Russian Jewish immigrant parents — was a legendary actor whose shadow Douglas struggled to escape, as he details in the early chapters of his memoir. He spent his childhood on movie sets, watching his father spar with iconic directors like Stanley Kubrick. Michael Douglas was subject to violent and angry outbursts as well. “Dad’s volatility kept us on edge,” he writes. He felt suffocated by his father’s legacy, often hoping to shake the title of “Kirk Douglas’ son.”

Early in his career, Douglas left his starring role on TV’s “The Streets of San Francisco” after producing his first film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which became a breakout success. On that film, he had to deliver the shattering news to his father that he was too old to play the lead — essentially, firing his father from his dream role. It was a betrayal. Instead, the role went to Jack Nicholson, who would later win an Academy Award for his humanizing portrayal of Randle McMurphy. The film won multiple Academy Awards, launching Douglas’ career as a heavyweight producer and later an actor. Escaping the shadow of being Kirk Douglas’ son has been a lifelong battle for the actor.

(Grand Central Publishing)

Occasionally, inheritance can be a burden. In his own life, Douglas details how he was a distracted father and husband who lost sight of his son, Cameron Douglas. During Cameron’s childhood, Douglas was elsewhere — on location in the Mexican jungle in “Romancing the Stone,” then a disastrous film production in Morocco for “Jewel of the Nile” that included a fatal plane crash that resulted in three crew members’ deaths. To cope with the breakneck pace of show business, Douglas sought refuge in women, cocaine and work.

Cameron’s troubled youth reached a crescendo when he was sentenced to five years in federal prison for drug smuggling, with an additional sentence for drug possession in prison — serving seven years in the end. It was enormously painful for Douglas, who also struggled with addiction, and had sought out treatment to provide an example to his son.

In a late chapter, he recalls confiding in Rob Reiner, who also had a son who struggled with addiction issues. In the memoir, Douglas addresses the killing of Rob and Michelle Reiner in December 2025; their son Nick has been charged with murder. “We both had sons with serious drug issues and we both, at times, had been at the end of our rope,” Douglas writes. “It was a heartbreaking confessional for us, but I know we gave each other some measure of comfort during the hard times.”

Why trudge through movie history, turning over every stone and every wound, in a nearly 500-page memoir? Because, according to Douglas, it’s time.

“Your 80s may be a good time to share,” the actor says, who recently turned 82. “People interested in movies, we give them a certain insight into the process, and maybe they could learn something. For others, it’s just gossip.” His battle with Stage 4 oral cancer brought the contours of his life into stark relief, sharpened by seven weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. His official diagnosis was tongue cancer, but he told the public he had throat cancer, hoping to stall speculation in the press about the possibility of disfigurement — and, more specifically, the prospect of losing his tongue. It was isolating, and Shane Salerno — the memoir’s co-author — stayed by Douglas’ side.

Michael Douglas.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

As much as Douglas’ memoir, “One Helluva Ride,” is a revealing and delightful account of a life in show business, it is also a love letter to California — a place where Douglas spent much of his adult life, beginning at UC Santa Barbara. The college travel brochure read: campus by the sea. “I remember the cover of it was a guy walking down the beach with a surfboard, two girls in two-piece bathing suits. In 1963, I never saw a two-piece bathing suit back east.” He was sold.

The California years made an impression. Douglas is still, at heart, a hippie. Raised in stiff East Coast prep culture, he was reborn in the California sunshine. “I transferred into becoming a hippie, influenced by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, hallucinatory drugs, and the world that existed in the early ‘60s in San Francisco.”

Strangely, Douglas argued that some of the utopic sentiments of the 1960s are returning. “People are beginning to look back at that time, and realize how important family is — cooperation, sharing,” he says. “Socialism is not a four-letter word or something that’s terrible. There are other things to pursue in life other than just making money.”

“Your 80s may be a good time to share,” Michael Douglas says.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

Like the characters he portrayed, Douglas is far from perfect. He admits that he struggled — in his first marriage, and later as a father. After marrying Diandra Luker, Douglas was unfaithful, having relationships with co-stars, most notably Turner on the set of “Romancing the Stone” in the Mexican jungle. The two denied the relationship for years. Now, with Turner’s blessing, Douglas writes about their involvement in his memoir.

Before Turner, there was Diane Thomas, the film’s waitress-turned-screenwriter, with whom Douglas had an affair. Thomas’ life was tragically cut short in a car accident involving a Porsche that Douglas had gifted her.

Then there were the rumors. On the set of “Basic Instinct,” some speculated that Douglas and Sharon Stone were having an affair. They weren’t, he explains. Douglas was instead locked in a power struggle with director Verhoeven, who, during one particularly heated argument with the actor, suffered a burst artery in his nose, turning the confrontation into a bloody scene. Douglas, meanwhile, was involved with another co-star, Jeanne Tripplehorn. “They were so focused on a possible relationship between Sharon and me, they missed the real relationship happening between me and Jeanne,” he writes.

When he and his current wife, actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, made it official, Douglas went to the other room to make breakup calls to five other women. (By this point in the memoir, Douglas has enough goodwill to pass this off as charming.) “From the moment I met Catherine, and we formed our family, I was a new man,” he writes.

The memoir enshrines Douglas’ petty show-business grievances too: a repaired grudge against David Letterman, a TV co-star who stole his longtime girlfriend, and a bouquet sent to Julia Roberts to apologize for his drunken buffoonery. In Douglas’ words: “There’s two or three people that I share my hostilities with.” He clashed with Brian De Palma, who was originally attached to direct “Fatal Attraction” and tried to have Douglas fired. De Palma underestimated Douglas and was replaced by Adrian Lyne. Years later, De Palma apologized, but Douglas rejected it.

It is impossible to tell the story of Douglas’ career without the women he encountered. The films he championed helped establish a new type of female lead — in all their powerful, morally ambiguous and deranged glory. “An actress was not allowed to play a villain,” he says. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the actor struggled to cast Nurse Ratched. “A whole number of leading actresses turned that part down until we found Louise Fletcher, who went on to win an Oscar.”

For Glenn Close, Sharon Stone and Kathleen Turner, acting opposite Michael Douglas was transformative. After her role as a murderous, sex-crazed bisexual in “Basic Instinct,” Stone became one of the biggest stars of the 1990s and earned an Oscar nomination for Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” Close‘s portrayal of the mistress-turned-lovesick psychopath in “Fatal Attraction” earned the actor her first lead Oscar nomination after three supporting nods. Turner went from being primarily known as the sexy femme fatale of “Body Heat” to a Golden Globe-winning star with box-office clout after her collaboration with Douglas. Sure, she sued him, too, but their friendship survived.

However, it wasn’t until his role as Gordon Gekko, the fast-talking, impulsive tycoon in 1987’s “Wall Street,” that Douglas was in full force, winning an Academy Award for lead actor. Directed by Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone, Douglas delivered an unforgettable performance about the dangers of unchecked capitalism and greed. At an early New York screening, Douglas recalls Wall Street traders being stunned by the film’s stinging accuracy. “A lot of the Wall Street characters were there, very cocky at the time; they all were shocked because we caught them.”

To his surprise, Wall Street financiers approached him on the street to praise Gekko — anointing him as their hero. “I said, ‘I was the villain.’ ‘No, no, no,’” he said. “So it showed me a lot.”

It speaks to Douglas’ gifts as an actor that he could transcend the caricature of white male entitlement he portrayed with such precision. In “Falling Down,” filmed during the 1992 uprising triggered by the Rodney King verdict, Douglas plays an unemployed defense worker, a man so consumed by disillusionment and blinded by his own sense of victimhood that he cannot recognize the harm he inflicts on others. The character would prove eerily prescient, anticipating an archetype that would take shape in the decades to come. An entire generation mistaking the actor’s brilliance as an invitation.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about being a movie star: Audiences decide who you are, and what you mean to them. For a chameleon, an actor who spent a lifetime resisting other people’s definitions of him, that might be the ultimate paradox.

As our conversation winds down, I remind him of his immense contributions to filmmaking, through producing and acting. It seems redundant, but I say it anyway. His response is polite.

“Quirky,” he said. “‘Falling Down,’ ‘The War of the Roses’ — I love those quirky films.”

“I’m proud of my movies,” he says. “I’m very proud of my movies.”

Connors is a culture journalist in L.A. She covers books, food, entertainment and offbeat Los Angeles. She’s currently at work on a book of essays about tourism in all its forms.