For 25 years, Douglas reigned as patriarch John Abbott in the fictional Genoa City on the daytime television serial The Young and the Restless.

[3] He attended Brandeis University and law school in Boston before he dropped out, began auditioning for acting roles and moved to California.

[citation needed] In March 2006, after 25 years on the show, Douglas departed The Young and The Restless in a storyline-dictated exit revolving around his character's involvement in the Tom Fisher murder case.

Douglas claimed that former headwriter of The Young and The Restless Lynn Marie Latham killed his character off because she could not understand why a man would run a cosmetics company.

In March 2008 he began appearing as a new character Alistair Wallingford, a drunken hack actor involved in a gaslighting plot, but was written out a few months later.