Nearly 50 years after their breakup, Brenda Vaccaro has finally explained how close she came to becoming Mrs. Michael Douglas. On October 12, the 86-year-old actress sat down with The Tom & Mickey Show, a YouTube interview program hosted by Tom Postilio and Mickey Conlon, and described a formal wedding that was already being planned when she walked away.
The timing could hardly be better. Her account arrives only days after Douglas, 82, told his own version in his memoir One Helluva Ride, published October 6, a book that has already made news for his long-denied romance with Kathleen Turner. For the first time, fans can read the Michael Douglas and Brenda Vaccaro breakup from both sides, and the two stories agree on more than you might expect, including one name neither of them has forgotten.
How Did Michael Douglas And Brenda Vaccaro Fall In Love?
They met making the 1971 drama Summertree, and according to People, they dated from 1971 to 1976. Vaccaro, born November 18, 1939, was nearly five years older than Douglas and already an established star, with three Tony nominations on Broadway in the 1960s and a Golden Globe nomination for Midnight Cowboy in 1969.
Douglas fell hard. In his book, he calls her “the whole package” and remembers her as “funny” with “a great sexy voice,” and he recalls that she nicknamed him “Hippie Dippy.” He describes it as the “most serious relationship” he had had up to that point.
The romance even survived a long-distance stretch. From 1972 to 1976, Douglas was playing Inspector Steve Keller opposite Karl Malden on The Streets of San Francisco and spent most of his time up north, while, as Entertainment Weekly reports, the couple shared a home on Hollywood Boulevard. Douglas jokes in the memoir that when she came to visit him, “She spent most of her visit watching me snore.”
Long before any engagement, though, the two had already exchanged vows of a very different kind.
What Was Their ‘Hippie Wedding’?
Vaccaro told the hosts that they held an informal ceremony in their agent’s backyard, with friends looking on. “And he gave me a leather ring because he was a hippie. And we got married with words and love,” she said. “And there was no priest, there was nothing. And everybody applauded, and we had this wedding.”
That day stayed with Douglas, too. He writes that the eventual breakup “hurt me deeply,” particularly because of what he calls the “mock wedding.”
Their families, however, wanted the real thing. According to People, Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne Buydens, pushed for a proper wedding, and so did Vaccaro’s own father. “And so I thought, why are we getting married again?” she said. The plans moved ahead anyway. “The provocative thing was that the invitations were being printed and there were 175 people I think,” she told the show, before adding a polite aside to her old flame: “Forgive me if I’m wrong, Michael.”
Looking back, she summed up her feelings in three words, as quoted by EW: “Pressure, not love.” By then, her heart had already moved on to someone else.
Who Did Brenda Vaccaro Leave Michael Douglas For?
“I fell in love with somebody else. I knew it,” Vaccaro said. “I wasn’t in love with him anymore. I knew it. He just wasn’t for me.” She did not name the other man on the show, but she did describe the moment she made her choice. “I got into my Mercedes. I drove out to Malibu and jumped into bed with the guy I was in love with,” she said. “That’s what I did.”
Douglas fills in the name in his memoir. It was actor Don Stroud, Vaccaro’s co-star in the 1976 thriller The House by the Lake, and EW reports that Douglas writes he overheard Vaccaro on the phone “sweet talking” Stroud. “I packed up and moved out,” he writes, adding that he left “holding back tears.”
Stroud has confirmed the romance. In a 2001 interview cited by People, he said he and Vaccaro had “a major affair” that lasted “at least three” more years, and he still calls her “a dear, dear friend.”
Not everyone thought it was wise at the time. In a 2017 interview with Closer Weekly, also reported by Fox News, Vaccaro said her close friend Robert Shaw, who was then making Jaws, warned her she was being rash. Shaw told her a fling like that “would lead to lasting regrets” if she left Douglas, and that warning became the question that has followed them both ever since.
Do Michael Douglas And Brenda Vaccaro Have Regrets?
For a while, both careers kept climbing side by side. In March 1976, Douglas took Vaccaro as his date to the Academy Awards, People reports, where she was a nominee for Best Supporting Actress for Once Is Not Enough, a role that won her a Golden Globe. On the same evening, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which Douglas co-produced, won Best Picture.
Within a year they had both moved on. Douglas married Diandra Luker in March 1977, and their son, Cameron, was born in 1978. Vaccaro went on to win an Emmy for The Shape of Things, and a younger generation knows her voice as Bunny Bravo on Johnny Bravo. She has been married to Guy Hector since 1986.
When it comes to regret, the two accounts are surprisingly gentle. Douglas writes that the split “should have happened long before it did” and that they had “simply grown apart.” He adds that he later heard through mutual acquaintances that “Brenda regretted ending our relationship and especially ending it for Don Stroud.” Vaccaro admitted as much back in 2017, telling Closer, “I regret all of it.”
Through it all, her feelings for him never soured. “I do still adore him,” she told Page Six in 2025, a conversation we covered when she reflected on her romance with Michael Douglas. The warmth runs both ways, because in the acknowledgments of One Helluva Ride, Douglas thanks Vaccaro for letting him interview her for the book. Five decades after she left him with the invitations at the printer, she helped him tell the story of their love.
