Michael Douglas met Diandra Luker in Washington D.C. while he was in development on "The China Syndrome" at a pre-inaugural party in honor of President Carter. Diandra, a blonde Spanish beauty from Majorca, was completing her last year at Georgetown University in the foreign service program. Her world was political and international and the name Michael Douglas meant little to the serious 20-year-old student.
"Michael had a beard and he was very handsome, " she recalls softly with almost no trace of Castilian accent. "I thought he was a painter. I was a little taken aback, a little disappointed to learn that he was an actor."
Daughter of a Spanish diplomat working for the American government in Paris, Diandra was educated at Swiss boarding schools where students were limited to one hour of French television a week. She was a teenager before she saw her first movie, "My Fair Lady".
But neither Michael Douglas nor movies remain strange to her for long. He and she were married within weeks.
(from "The China Syndrome" press kit, 1979).
