Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Catherine Zeta-Jones for Marrying Michael Douglas

She is now eligible for AARP.

He's been eligible for it for 25 years.

September 25, 1944, 75 years ago: Michael Kirk Douglas is born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

September 25, 1969, 50 years ago: Catherine Zeta-Jones is born in Swansea, Wales.

People who know me know that I have a hopeless celebrity crush on Catherine, and that it bugs me that, although we're roughly the same age, she married someone so much older with my name. (The fact that he was born in the city next-door to the town where I grew up has nothing to do with it.)

But can I really blame her?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Catherine Zeta-Jones for Marrying Michael Douglas

5. A Sympathetic Ear. She had already been a celebrity in her native Britain for a few years, but she was just becoming a big star in America at the time they met, with her star turns in The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. Having someone, literally, in-house who knew what it was like to be a big star in America was helpful.

4. Industry Cred. His friends and allies became hers, and helped steer her to the right projects.

3. The American President. No, not Trump -- or even the man who was President when they met, Bill Clinton. I'm talking about the movie Michael made in 1995, playing a fictional President, a widower who ends up dating an environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening.

In 1990, Bening was 31, and Warren Beatty was 53, when they filmed Bugsy together, with Beatty playing Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the gangster who helped make Las Vegas, and Bening played Virginia Hill, Siegel's mistress. (When they met, in 1945, Siegel was 39 and Hill was 29.)

Annette Bening, now 61; and Warren Beatty, now 82.

They have 2 sons and 2 daughters.

There had previously been a movie about Hill in 1974, titled simply Virginia Hill. It starred Dyan Cannon, then 37, and Harvey Keitel, actually younger at 35, as Siegel. But Cannon, too, married a much older actor: In 1965, at 28, she married Cary Grant, then 61. It lasted only 2 years, but it produced each's only child, actress Jennifer Grant.

By the time they met, Douglas was 54 and Zeta-Jones was 29, but Beatty and Bening were still together -- and they still are, as well. Surely, after having co-starred with Bening -- when Douglas was 51 and Bening was 37 -- it had to have occurred to Douglas that, if Beatty, also a man honored for his acting but notorious as a womanizer, could find true love in his 50s, maybe he could, too.

Incidentally, in The American President, while people objected to the widowed President Andrew Shepherd and the never-married Sydney Ellen Wade having a relationship on the grounds that he was the President and she was a lobbyist, the characters' apparent large age difference was never brought up.

2. Michael Douglas -- as he was then. True, he was already 54 years old, and he had costars playing his wife, or girlfriend, or mistress, when they should have been playing his daughter. But he wasn't elderly. He was still considered a very charismatic romantic leading man.

To put it another way: These actors turned 54 years old this year, or will: Kevin Costner, Charles Shaughnessy (Mistah Sheffield on The Nanny), Jeff Daniels, Kelsey Grammer, Bruce Willis, Jimmy Smits, Peter Gallagher, Kevin Conroy and Steven Culp. Each of them still gets taken seriously as a romantic lead, or an action hero, or even both.

1. They're Still Together. It's been rough at times, but they continue to work it out. Their son Dylan is now 19 and in college. Their daughter Carys is 16, and has already appeared on 2 magazine covers with her mother. Both inherited the "Douglas Dimple" made famous by Michael's father Kirk Douglas, now 102 years old and one of the last survivors of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

At Kirk Douglas' 100th birthday party.

Front: Kirk and wife Anne Buydens, who has also since turned 100.

Back: Carys, Michael, Catherine and Dylan.

Kirk's 1st wife, Michael's mother, Diana, died in 2015.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. It looks like they're going to stick with what works until it stops working.

UPDATE: Kirk Douglas died on February 5, 2020, at age 103.