LOS ANGELES - SUPERSTAR actors and athletes both know they must make adjustments when their skills and body begin to age.

Michael Douglas, who's been a movie star in four consecutive decades, knows his new film King Of California, released this month, in some ways represents the end of his film career as a popular romantic leading man.

While a pair of his peers, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, have recently reprised their action roles in another Rocky and Die Hard film, Douglas doesn't have one of those franchise parts to repeat.

'King Of California is an independent film where I play a mentally disturbed person who reunites with his teenage daughter and attempts to enlist her help in looking for treasure he believes is buried under a department store,' explains the actor-producer who starred in and guided such international hits as Romancing The Stone, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

Married to Oscar-winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones(Chicago), with whom he shares a birthday, the son of legendary filmmaker Kirk Douglas turns 63 on September 25.

Though Douglas hasn't had a huge hit movie since 2001 thriller Don't Say A Word, he remains the only person in history to have won Academy Awards for acting (Best Actor in Oliver Stone's Wall Street) and producing (1975's Best Picture One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest).

'I've actually enjoyed doing a character part in King Of California, because I can't fall back on the acting tricks I've mastered as a leading man.'

Douglas laughs warmly, and grins before adding, 'My wife hates the beard that I wear in King Of California. She doesn't enjoy having this weird character roaming around our house!'

With Hollywood seemingly stuck in sequel and remake mode (evidenced by the fact that the new Nicole Kidman movie Invasion is the third remake of the classic Don Siegel-directed Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) Douglas is having difficulty finding projects to produce that evoke his passion.

Douglas is accepting his cinematic evolution gracefully. -- AFP