The 45th Golden Globes were held on January 23, 1988, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Besides honoring the best in film and television from 1987, the night was a source of fashion statements and celebrity news.
Golden Globe winner Tom Selleck and wife Jillie Mack made their first public appearance as a married couple, both wearing tuxedos, manifesting high fashion as a couple style. Golden Globe winner Raquel Welch invited her then-husband, filmmaker André Weinfeld, who brought his own camera to capture everything happening in the ballroom that evening.

Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick made their first public appearance before getting married a few months later. At the same time, first-time Golden Globe nominee Denzel Washington walked the red carpet with his wife Pauletta Pearson. Fellow nominees Nick Nolte and Patrick Swayze did the same with their respective spouses, Rebecca Linger and Lisa Niemi.
Future Golden Globe winner Winona Ryder, then only 17 years old, had her first Golden Globe experience with date Rob Lowe, who was nominated for his performance in Square Dance, a coming-of-age film in which the couple co-starred. Golden Globe nominee Candice Bergen was a plus one for her husband, French director Louis Malle, whose drama Goodbye, Children was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

That night was a moment of honor for Clint Eastwood, who received the Cecil B. deMille Award, and a night of triumph for Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic drama The Last Emperor won four awards out of its five nominations.
But it was also a triumphant evening for Michael Douglas, accompanied by his then-wife Diandra Luker. While Douglas had previously been honored as a producer for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Romancing the Stone, he won his first acting Golden Globe for his starring performance in Wall Street. Interestingly, Douglas additionally co-starred in Fatal Attraction, which was also contending for Best Drama that year.

Co-written and directed by Oliver Stone, Wall Street had its roots as a tribute to his father, a stockbroker during the Great Depression. The first fiction film to so rigorously document the realm of Wall Street, the movie belongs in the pantheon of the best films in history. Douglas’s iconic character, Gordon Gekko, is a wealthy, opportunistic corporate raider who has in turn served as the inspiration for plenty of other fictional figures, including Richard Gere’s Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman (for which Gere received a Best Actor – Musical or Comedy Golden Globe nomination in 1991) and Bobby Axelrod in Billions, portrayed by Golden Globe winner Damian Lewis.
Wall Street also paved the way for other projects spotlighting the world of high finance, such as James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which brought Al Pacino a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1993; Adam McKay’s The Big Short, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy in 2016; and, later, Succession, the winner of Best TV Series – Drama Golden Globes in both 2020 and 2022.