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Douglas nails Liberace's velvety, nasal voice and almost-ever-present pearly smile. "One of the things I enjoyed about this part was I got to smile," he said. "I don't smile a lot in my pictures. I'm always so ... grim." Still, in "Candelabra," there isn't always lots to smile about. Thorson, a child of foster care, falls sway to Liberace's charm and support, but it comes with a price. He is subjected to plastic surgery to mold him into a young Liberace (one of the remarkable makeup transformations Damon undergoes). He also becomes hooked on drugs in his mission to stay slim for Liberace, and, after a few years, his addiction and Liberace's philandering bring a cruel end to the relationship, after which Thorson unsuccessfully sues for palimony. Douglas, too, sports a variety of looks. Liberace is seen before and after his own plastic-surgery refresher, and, in a final scene, gravely sick from an AIDS-related illness from which he died in 1987 at age 67. This death scene is particularly haunting for anyone who followed Douglas' recent near-death experience. "Candelabra" is his comeback performance after a brutal six-month regimen of radiation and chemotherapy for stage 4 throat cancer in 2010. When he stepped in front of the cameras after his own brush with mortality, he seems to have embraced Liberace as a positive life force and a fitting way to get back in the game. "Yeah, I did," he said. "I was enraptured by the joy that Lee had. He was a bit of sunshine to me." But Liberace also had a dark side. This, Douglas also captures despite a refusal to acknowledge it. "It sort of happened," he said. "It was there in the story." And while he allowed that "Candelabra" viewers might see Liberace as tormented and self-destructive, among sunnier traits, "I didn't see him that way. I didn't see a dark side to him. "My career has been more in the gray area, if not the dark area," Douglas went on (needing to point no further than rapacious money man Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film "Wall Street," a character for which he won a best-actor Oscar, then revived it in the 2010 sequel, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"). Playing Liberace "was so much fun!" he said. "You put on this mask and it allows you to do anything you want. I don't get to do that very often. My movies are usually about stripping off the makeup, getting down to the skeleton." In "Candelabra," Douglas certainly got to wear a lot of makeup, and subsequent projects should allow him to embody other colorful characters
-- such as President Ronald Reagan in the film he was about to start, "Reykjavik." "I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be," Douglas said. "But during this two-year-plus hiatus, a bunch of good material came my way." As he spoke, he had already wrapped a comedy called "Last Vegas." Ahead is a Rob Reiner film with Diane Keaton, and a couple after that. "I'm at an age where I can try different things, do much different stuff than I thought I could do," he summed up, looking pleased at a career (and himself) unexpectedly reborn. "I'm starting over. What I went through with Liberace has given me the confidence for this." ___ Online:
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