Michael Douglas prepares for his role as Liberace

Michael Douglas has told The Hollywood Reporter that he is just happy to be talking after a year of “adversity”, including discovering he had stage four throat cancer, his son Cameron being sentenced to prison on drug charges and his ex-wife suing him for earnings from the Wall Street sequel.

He is  looking towards his next film role, playing iconic pianist Liberace, which is expected to start shooting in the summer of 2011 and will require Douglas to undergo special prosthetic work as well as musical training.Douglas said “I’m thinking; I’m a blank slate.

Everything shows me he was a lovely man; I just want to reconfirm that.”Douglas says he won’t learn until January whether the tumor in his throat has been eliminated, but described his chemotherapy as a “hellhole”,he adds he is still coming to terms with cancer.”I haven’t really digested it yet, truth be told,” he said.It brought him closer to his 93-year-old father, actor Kirk Douglas, with whom he once fought with.”He came over every day. He was great,” Douglas said. “As I looked through the stats, I didn’t think of this as life and death,I just saw it as an illness to get over. So I didn’t dig into the bottom of my soul to see what I could see.”