Michael Douglas Says He and Kathleen Turner Had a Secret Romance

In a memoir excerpt, Douglas says they fell for each other making 'Romancing the Stone' and denied it for four decades.

Michael Douglas says he and Kathleen Turner were secretly a couple while they made Romancing the Stone, the 1984 film. He says they then spent 40 years denying it.

The confession is in Douglas's memoir, One Helluva Ride, and he shared a passage from it with People on Thursday. By Friday, the romance was the No. 1 search in California on Google Trends.

The way Douglas tells it, his marriage was already coming apart. He and his then-wife, Diandra Douglas, had separated, and he writes that both of them were seeing other people at the time, The Hollywood Reporter reported in its account of the excerpt.

"Kathleen and I fell hard for each other and began a relationship," Douglas wrote in an excerpt from his memoir One Helluva Ride, published by People. The two promised each other they'd keep it private, and Douglas says they hid it so well that neither the director, Bob Zemeckis, nor their co-star Danny DeVito ever caught on, THR reported.

The secret didn't end when filming did. Douglas writes that the heat between them on screen left fans sure for years that the two were together off camera. They denied it anyway, from Romancing the Stone through Jewel of the Nile and War of the Roses, and again a few years ago when they were promoting The Kominsky Method.

He describes the public version as a carefully half-true story. They'd admit to the chemistry. They'd admit that, as Turner once put it, they were both terrible flirts, and that they'd both been tempted. Then they'd insist nothing had happened.

"That was a lie," Douglas wrote in the excerpt published by People.

His reason for keeping it up for four decades, he says, was to protect his wife and their son.

Turner didn't let the news sit long. On Friday she gave People a two-sentence statement, which THR carried in full, and it neither confirms nor disputes a word of his account.

"Good heavens what a fuss about something 40 years ago! I love Michael and I look forward to enjoying the book," Turner told People.