Actor Michael Douglas, 82, writes in his new memoir that he did have an affair during the 1992 shoot of “Basic Instinct,” but it was with Jeanne Tripplehorn, not Sharon Stone, answering a rumor that has followed the film for decades.
The roughly 500-page book, “One Helluva Ride,” was published on Oct. 6, 2026.
Paul Verhoeven directed “Basic Instinct,” an erotic thriller that set Douglas’ detective against Stone’s murder suspect in a cat-and-mouse story. The film’s incendiary scenes made it a box-office sensation. Audiences spent years speculating about a real-life romance, convinced by the heat between the two leads. According to the memoir, Douglas says the attention landed on the wrong pair.
“The truth is, I fell very hard for Jeanne despite our nearly 20-year age difference,” Douglas wrote.
“With Jeanne, the passion you see onscreen reflects the genuine passion of our brief affair,” he added.
A Romance Kept Quiet
Tripplehorn, now 63, played a police psychologist and the love interest to Douglas’ detective. She was 28 and unmarried when the movie opened, and Douglas was 47 and still married to his first wife, Diandra Luker. The production filmed in San Francisco.
The two spent long stretches talking and getting to know each other away from production, by his account. The cast and crew never learned of the romance, he writes, because the pair took considerable pains to hide it.
A married man was not someone Tripplehorn was willing to become involved with, Douglas writes, and that held until he told her that he and Luker had formally separated, that they were each seeing other people and that they knew the marriage was finished. He writes that he was prepared to leave his wife for her.
He writes that he stopped short. Nearly two decades of marriage had just ended, and he recognized that the worst move available would have been to plunge straight into another serious commitment. The romance ran through production, and the two went their separate ways when the shoot ended. He writes that he remembers her warmly, as both a performer and a person.
Douglas Spoke to Tripplehorn
Tripplehorn heard from him before the affair went into the book and had no objection, Douglas told Page Six. He said he has not seen her in years. He said such chapters are not merely about affairs, but about significant friendships formed through work.
Tripplehorn later starred in “Waterworld.” In 2000 she married actor Leland Orser, now 66, the same year Douglas married Catherine Zeta-Jones, 57. The divorce Luker filed for in 1995 was finalized in 2000. Douglas and Zeta-Jones have two children, Dylan and Carys.
Zeta-Jones has joked about the book. She told NBC’s “Today” on Oct. 8 that she has “no intention of reading about him.” She later told “The View,” “I’m going to read it.”
Douglas Denies Punching His Director
The memoir takes on a second piece of “Basic Instinct” lore, the persistent story that Douglas punched his director. Not so, he writes.
Douglas writes that the two squared off in a heated argument after he accused Verhoeven of giving Stone preferential treatment. As they stood face to face, blood poured from the director’s nose, according to his account. Douglas writes that an artery had burst and that Verhoeven was hemorrhaging. The production lost several full shooting days while Verhoeven recovered, and the director came back under doctor’s orders to work a reduced schedule.
More From the Memoir
The Tripplehorn disclosure is the second confession pulled from the book in a matter of days. An excerpt obtained before publication described a relationship between Douglas and Kathleen Turner while the two made “Romancing the Stone,” released in 1984. To shield Luker and the couple’s son, Cameron, Douglas kept the Turner relationship quiet for 40 years. Turner told People that the attention concerned something that happened four decades ago.
The book also covers Douglas’ cocaine addiction, his cancer battle and his marriage to Zeta-Jones, including a brief separation. His father, the screen legend Kirk Douglas, returns in its pages, along with the complicated bond between them and the professional decisions that strained it. Douglas had to tell his father that he would not be cast as Randle P. McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a role Kirk Douglas had been promised. Jack Nicholson took the part instead and won an Oscar for it.
Douglas has spent more than five decades in the film industry. He took home two Academy Awards of his own, best actor for “Wall Street” and a producing prize for “Cuckoo’s Nest.”
