Michael Douglas has revealed that his now Oscar-winning performance in Wall Street almost came apart early on after director Oliver Stone openly questioned his acting during filming.

Speaking at the recent TCM Classic Film Festival in New York City, Douglas recalled a tense moment just two weeks into production on the 1987 film when Stone paid an unexpected visit to his trailer. 

“Okay, so we were finishing the second week of filming, and there was a knock on my door. ‘Hey Mike, it’s s Oliver. Can I come in?’” Douglas said. What followed, he admitted, caught him completely off guard.

Once inside, Stone asked if he was alright before bluntly questioning whether Douglas was taking drugs. 

Douglas told the audience that he denied it, only for the director to deliver a cutting assessment of his work. “Because you look like you’ve never acted before in your life,” Stone told him.

At the time, Douglas explained, he hadn’t been reviewing the daily footage of his scenes, something he typically avoids. 

He told Stone he doesn’t watch dailies because he tends to focus on flaws and what might not make the final cut. 

Still, the exchange forced him to reconsider. “So I said, ‘I guess I’d better take a look,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you better,’” Douglas recalled.

After reviewing the footage more closely once filming resumed, Douglas felt reassured rather than alarmed. He said the performances looked solid and repeatedly told Stone he believed the work was strong.

Eventually, the director came around and agreed with his leading man.

Douglas went on to portray Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider at the centre of Wall Street, opposite Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah.

Looking back, Douglas said he never took Stone’s harsh words personally, believing they were part of the director’s process. 

“He was willing for me to hate his guts for the rest of this movie to get that extra little push,” Douglas said. He added that Stone’s history with actors speaks for itself and credited him for pushing the performance further. 

“So I’m deeply, deeply appreciative of the fact that it gave me part and the fact that he pushed me to another level.”

The result was career-defining. 

Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role, along with a Golden Globe and the National Board of Review’s top acting prize. 

He later returned as Gekko in Stone’s 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

What began as a moment of doubt and degradation ultimately became one of the most celebrated performances of Douglas’ career, proving that even an Oscar-winning role can start with a door knock and a brutal reality check.

Catherine O’Hara died from a pulmonary embolism, with cancer as the underlying cause, according to a Los Angeles County death certificate issued Monday, The Associated Press reported.

The certificate lists the pulmonary embolism, which occurs when a blood clot blocks an artery in the lungs, as the immediate cause of the actor’s Jan. 30 death at age 71. Rectal cancer was the long-term cause.

The oncologist who signed off on the certificate indicated that he had been treating O’Hara since March of last year, and last saw her on Jan. 27. She died at a hospital in Santa Monica, California. She was cremated, according to the document.

The beloved Canadian-born comic actor and “SCTV” alum starred as Macaulay Culkin’s mother in two “Home Alone” movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically oblivious wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek.”

Her death came as a surprise to most fans, and an initial statement from her representatives said only that she died “following a brief illness.”

Over the course of her five-decade career, O’Hara had roles on numerous television series, including “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Studio.”

She also appeared in several films, including the HBO production “Temple Grandin,” for which she received an Emmy nomination. 

In 2015, O’Hara teamed up with her longtime friend and fellow”SCTV” alum Eugene Levy for the sitcom “Schitt’s Creek.” The two also appeared in seven movies together throughout their careers, including four Christopher Guest mockumentaries.

Her collaborators and costars over the years, including Levy, Culkin, Guest and Pedro Pascal, paid her loving tribute after her death.

“Mama. I thought we had time,” Culkin posted on Instagram, along with side-by-side images of the two of them from “Home Alone” and the two together at Culkin’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. “I wanted more. I wanted to sit in a chair next to you. I heard you. But I had so much more to say. I love you. I’ll see you later.”

Michael Keaton, who starred alongside O’Hara in “Beetlejuice” and “The Paper,” wrote on Instagram, “She’s been my pretend wife, my pretend nemesis and my real life, true friend. This one hurts. Man am I gonna miss her.”

Seth Rogen, whom O’Hara had worked with recently on the Apple TV series “The Studio,” wrote on Instagram that she was “hysterical, kind, intuitive, generous… she made me want to make our show good enough to be worthy of her presence in it.”

“We’re all lucky we got to live in a world with her in it,” he added.

Cadillac has become the first American auto giant to step into the fiercely competitive world of Formula One with a dedicated team. The storied U.S. brand unveiled the official team livery for its inaugural 2026 season during the Super Bowl Sunday night.

The Super Bowl ad, which aired during the fourth quarter, shows the black and white livery. It features part of President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech in which he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

“That challenge is one that we are willing to accept … and one which we intend to win,” the edited speech said in the ad. The short feature closed out with the phrase: “THE MISSION BEGINS.”

While Ford has been present in the sport as an engine supplier and owner of the U.K.-based Jaguar team, this is the first time an American auto giant will race under its own branding.

Leading Cadillac’s effort is team principal Graeme Lowdon, who’s built the team from the ground up, including new facilities in Indiana, the home of Indycar; North Carolina, the home of NASCAR; and Silverstone, England, the home of F1.

Speaking with CBS before the livery reveal, Lowdon called the road to get Cadillac into the F1 game “lengthy, with lots of twists and turns.”

He recently shared that Cadillac had hired more than 500 people to join the new team, from a pool of some 143,000 applicants.

“There’s a lot of expectation, and quite rightly so,” Lowdon told CBS News. “General Motors is a hugely respected and impressive entity … so there is that pressure, but that’s what Formula One’s about.”

On the track, the American brand will be represented by former Mercedes team driver Valtteri Bottas, originally from Finland, and Mexican former Red Bull driver Sergio Perez. Widely considered to be veterans in the sport, they have a total of 16 Grand Prix victories and more than 500 race starts between them.

Having that level of experience behind the wheel, for an otherwise new team, was the chief motivator behind signing those two drivers, according to Lowdon.

“These guys know how to win,” he said. “But above all else, they have an ability to gel a team together, so they’re the focal point for the engineering activities, the garage activities, everything to do with operating a team at the highest level.”

A slow start in a fast sport? 

Experts say American fans hoping Cadillac will deliver a blockbuster first season as it steps into the ring against longtime heavyweights such as Ferrari and Mercedes may be disappointed. 

The odds of Cadillac winning an F1 race, or even finishing on the podium this season, aren’t generally considered very strong. 

A winning Formula One car, and a winning team behind it, can take at least several seasons to develop, and require consistent investment.

Ross Brawn, the man widely credited as the architect behind German F1 sensation Michael Schumacher‘s success, told CBS News at the 2026 Autosport Awards in London that American fans may need some patience.

“It’s very tough,” Brawn said about the expectations for the Cadillac team this season. “They’ve got some very good people there. They have been sensible in choosing a lot of experienced people, but it’s going to be very tough, so give them a bit of time.”

David Croft, a prominent Formula One commentator for Britain’s Sky Sports network, urged fans this year to look for development, not podium placement.

“Wherever they start the hope for me is that that’s not where they’ll finish,” he told CBS News at the 2026 Autosport Awards. “They’ve got the drive and the determination, and they’ve got the right people in place to be a success eventually in Formula One, but it’s going to take a bit of time.”

Formula One’s growing popularity in the U.S.

According to ESPN, which has long held Formula One broadcasting rights in the U.S., 2025 was the biggest season to date for average viewership for the sport, with 16 of the 24 races setting viewership records. The broadcaster has said that over the past eight years, average viewership per Grand Prix more than doubled, from 554,000 to 1.3 million in the U.S.

Formula One is still dwarfed in the U.S. as a racing spectator sport, with overall viewership for the Nascar Cup Series, for instance, averaging 3.2 million in 2025. 

But insiders say the trajectory is undeniable, and encouraging.

“There was a time we’d go to Austin, the U.S. Grand Prix, and nobody would know what Formula One is when we got to passport control, let alone who we were,” Croft told CBS. “Now people know who we are and what Formula One is, what it stands for.” 

Many pundits see the success of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series behind F1’s rising popularity in the U.S.

Croft also credited the addition of two more races in the United States, in Miami and Las Vegas. Alongside races in Texas, Mexico, Canada and Brazil, a total of six F1 races now take place within American time zones, making it easier for fans to tune into the action live, he noted.

Lowdon hopes Cadillac can ride the wave of popularity, and that fans will enjoy following the new team’s journey – even if it means settling for relatively small “wins” at first.

“It’s really so difficult to achieve success that, if you come along and join the journey … then [fans] can enjoy, if you like, the minor victories along the way,” he said. “Even just producing a car as complex as this is a minor victory in itself.”