Michael Hardoin @michael_hardoin - Twitter Profile

Michael Hardoin @michael_hardoin

about 2 hours ago

Jonathan Winters

Olivia ❤️

@HemishaV

about 11 hours ago

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Michael Hardoin @michael_hardoin

about 2 hours ago

Yes, even more than that!

Maria

@dimkovska88

about 22 hours ago

⚠️ Real Talk: Do you agree with President Trump that ABC, CBS, and CNN are crooked as hell?

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michael_hardoin retweeted

Crazy Vibes

@CrazyVibes_1

about 11 hours ago

Two men walk into a room. One has just won Hollywood's biggest prize. The other can barely fit through the door. It is 1987. Michael Douglas is 43 years old and on top of the world. Andre the Giant is 41 and weighing over 500 pounds. The camera clicks. Nobody forgets this photo. Look at that hand. Andre the Giant's hand rests on Michael Douglas's shoulder like a catcher's mitt wrapped around a baseball. Douglas, himself no small man, looks like a child standing next to a mountain. But here's what the picture doesn't tell you. These two men share something far bigger than the size difference between them. They both know what it feels like to carry something enormous — one on the outside, one within. Michael Kirk Douglas was born on September 25, 1944, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He grew up the son of Hollywood royalty — his father was Kirk Douglas — but that name came with a weight of its own. Kirk actively discouraged his son from acting, warning him the industry was filled with heartbreak. Michael did it anyway. He scraped for years. He hustled as a stage actor. He ground through television, landing a role on The Streets of San Francisco in 1972 that kept him working but didn't make him famous. Then came 1975. He produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — a film his father had tried and failed to turn into a movie for years. It swept the Oscars. Best Picture. Michael Douglas, age 30, held the trophy. But it was as a producer. The world still hadn't seen what he could do as an actor. That changed in 1987. Wall Street opens in November. Douglas plays Gordon Gekko — slicked back hair, suspenders, ruthless charm. "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." The country goes wild. In March 1988, at age 43, Douglas walks up to the podium at the Academy Awards and takes home Best Actor. It is a decade in the making. But here's what most people miss: that same year, 1987, Douglas is photographed with a man whose body is quietly destroying itself — and the man is smiling. André René Roussimoff was born on May 19, 1946, in Coulommiers, France. He weighed 13 pounds at birth. By age 12, he was already 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 240 pounds. His neighbors in the tiny farming village of Molien thought he was a miracle. His body had other plans. Andre suffered from acromegaly — a pituitary gland tumor that floods the body with growth hormone and never stops. It makes bones grow. It makes organs grow. It makes a man into something the world has never seen before and will never see again. By the time he was an adult, Andre stood 7 feet tall and weighed over 500 pounds. Every step he took was pain. Every night he tried to sleep, his body made it harder. He wrestled more than 300 days a year through the 1970s. Three hundred days. He became the most famous wrestler on the planet — "The Eighth Wonder of the World." In 1987, the same year Douglas won his Oscar, Andre stepped into WrestleMania III in front of 93,173 screaming fans in the Pontiac Silverdome. It remains one of the most watched moments in wrestling history. And yet, off the canvas, Andre was something nobody expected: gentle. Funny. He was known to quietly pick up a dinner tab for 20 people. He carried himself with a dignity that had nothing to do with his size. People who met him — really met him — said the same thing: he was kind. Michael Douglas remembered him that way. On what would have been Andre's 74th birthday, Douglas posted a photo of the two of them on Instagram and wrote that Andre would "forever be remembered as a true champion inside and outside the ring." In this late 1980s photograph, Andre is 41 or 42. He has perhaps 4 or 5 years left to live. His body is working against him every single day, and treatment options for acromegaly in that era were deeply limited. He will die on January 28, 1993, in a Paris hotel room, at just 46 years old, from congestive heart failure. He is in France for his father's funeral. He dies in his sleep. When they go to cremate him, no crematorium in France is large enough. His body must be flown back to the United States. His ashes are scattered over his ranch in Ellerbe, North Carolina. He is inducted posthumously as the very first member of the WWE Hall of Fame — also in 1993, the year he dies. The first. Out of everyone who ever laced up boots in that ring. Look at the photo again. Two men, one moment, late 1980s. One is at the peak of his career, Oscar on the shelf, the world at his feet. The other is smiling despite carrying a body that is slowly failing him — and he has no idea, or maybe he does, and he smiles anyway. That is the part that stays with you. Not the size. Not the fame. The smile. Share this with someone who believes strength is only something you can see.