“Not that I would whiteknuckle it until the day he drops down dead. Or the day I drop down dead.”

As Kirk Douglas’s

102nd birthday approaches, Catherine ZetaJones has had a quiet word with her husband, Kirk’s son

Michael. The actress, 25 years younger than him at 49, grins: “I joke to him, ‘I wasn’t planning on the 102 thing with you. So we may have to regroup in a few years and see where we are’.”

The couple have “ups and downs”, she admits to Sunday Times Magazine, but adds: “I don’t throw the towel in very quickly on anything.