Actors and Addiction

A lot. "It was all that stuff. It was anything I could get my hands on. I liked it all." He got sober, he says, because "You get panicked. I was 22, and I got panicked for my life."

An exceptionally talented actor, Hoffman is far from alone: many of us use and abuse. According to surveys, at least 1 in 10 adult Americans has a serious alcohol problem (Institute of Medicine); around twenty percent of both men and women are smokers (Centers for Disease Control), and approximately 1 in 35 over age 12 is an illicit drug user (Institute of Medicine).

Addiction psychologist Marc F. Kern, Ph.D., says “Altering one's state of consciousness is normal” and that a destructive habit or addiction is “mostly an unconscious strategy - which you started to develop at a naive, much earlier stage of life - to enjoy the feelings it brought on or to help cope with uncomfortable emotions or feelings. It is simply an adaptation that has gone awry.”

William H. Macy, also an Oscar nominee [in 1997, for “Fargo”] once commented, “Nobody became an actor because he had a good childhood.”

While that may not be literally true, many actors (and other people too, of course) have had painful lives, and use substances to cope.

For example Tatum O'Neal, an Oscar winner at age 10, says in her autobiography (“A Paper Life”) that growing up she had to deal with her mentally unstable mother and volatile and unpredictable father, in an environment of drugs, neglect, and physical and mental abuse.

By age 20, she was addicted to cocaine.

Psychiatrist Leon Wurmser, M.D. says “Anxiety of an overwhelming nature and the emotional feelings of pain, injury, woundedness, and vulnerability appear to be a feature common to all types of compulsive drug use. Child abuse is, in the simplest and strongest terms, one of the most important etiologic factors for later drug abuse.” [From his article Drug Use as a Protective System]

Johnny Depp has said he felt so intimidated by his celebrity status during his early career, that he drank. "I'd go to functions and back in those days I literally had to be drunk to be able to speak and get through it. I guess I was trying not to feel anything. My drug of choice back then was alcohol more than anything.”

Ed Harris, commenting about playing the lead in “Pollock,” has admitted to having ”a slight drinking problem at that time... It had to do with things that you don't talk about, very private and similar fears [to Pollock's] about the need for approval and attention and the desire to do something that makes me feel worthy."

Michael J. Fox developed a drinking problem after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991. "I craved alcohol as a direct response to the need I felt to escape my situation," he writes in Lucky Man: A Memoir. "Joyless and secretive, I drank to disassociate; drinking now was about isolation and self-medication."

Being driven to achieve can also lead to addiction problems. Chris Penn fought cocaine and alcohol abuse for years, but died recently at age 40. Like many talented people in the arts, he wanted to do more and more, often working late into the night writing and working with equipment for a film he wanted to make, even helping construct the set.

Key entertainment industry executives and producers, even fellow actors, may enable drug and alcohol abuse, unless it gets too “out of control.” As fictional movie studio exec Peter Dragon (Jay Mohr) said in the TV series "Action" (1999): "Yeah - in rehab you're an addict; on a sound stage you're a tortured genius."

An ABC News article [When Really Successful People Crack, By Andrea Canning] says Gary Stromberg, author of "Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery," told ABC News, "With creative people in general, I think there is more of a tendency to gravitate toward substance abuse.

"Creative people push the envelope, and there's no net," he said. "They live on the edge and that's risky. They live in a world surrounded by people who adore them and enable them. No one telling them no. ... They live privileged lives and they don't play by the same rules as the rest of the world. They are crying out for someone to say no to them."

Robert Downey Jr. has apparently been “indulged” for years on account of his exceptional acting talent. His former wife Sarah Jessica Parker admits, “Fairly early on, he told me he had a drug problem. Addiction didn’t seem like something that would impose itself on us. I was very wrong.

"In every good and bad way, I enabled him to show up for work. If he didn’t, I’d cover for him, find him, clean him up. He was like a broken pipe with a leak that you’re constantly putting tape around and tape over tape, but you can’t stop the leaking.” [Parade mag., January 29, 2006]

Downey admits “the actions I took and the decisions I made tied my shoelaces together. But I've never been as trustworthy or worked so hard as I am now [being sober]. I'm having a better time. It's more fun to be clear and accountable. Believe me, I speak from experience.” [LA Times May 14, 2005]

In her memoir Looking for Gatsby: My Life, Faye Dunaway said she is “the child of a driven, dream-deprived mother and distant, alcoholic father” and admits using food “to counter the stress of filmmaking. I've never stopped guarding against a return to that kind of emotional reliance on food, and as I grew into this sophisticated world, alcohol. I'm finally beyond that now, but it was the pendulum I would swing on for years."

Carrie Fisher detailed some of her addiction experience in her autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge. In a Psychology Today article she said, “Drugs made me feel more normal. They contained me."

At times, she took 30 Percodan a day. "You don't even get high. It's like a job, you punch in," she said. At age 28, she overdosed, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

"It was [Richard] Dreyfuss who came to the hospital and said, 'You're a drug addict, but I have to tell you that I've observed this other thing in you: You're a manic-depressive.' So maybe I was taking drugs to keep the monster in the box," she said.

Those “monsters” can be a wide range of mental health and life issues, and we use a variety of substances to deal with them: former Full House actress Jodie Sweetin, and Tom Sizemore: crystal meth; Colin Farrell: painkillers; Lindsay Lohan: smoking.

William Petersen was working up to 12 to 14 hours a day on his tv series CSI, but was a smoker for many years, and started to experience heart problems, a recent article noted [Addictions and Your Heart, by David Krissman, Beverly Hills [213] March 15th, 2006 beverlyhills213.com].

"There is evidence that both smoking and alcohol can cause irregular heart beats," says cardiologist Dr. Sheila Kar, who diagnosed Petersen.

"Dr. Kar was able to help him, but it wasn’t without his hard work and sacrifice. 'I was on medications for one thing,' Petersen says of his treatment. 'We got my heart back in rhythm and then we’ve been keeping it that way through exercise and diet, [and] lower stress in my life.'

"Now Petersen," the article adds, "works less and continues to fight his addiction to cigarettes. 'Cigarettes are a hard addiction,' he says. 'I started to try to stop smoking four years ago. Then it took awhile. You fail and you start again. Then things like heart problems surface and you quit.'"

Nicole Kidman has also admitted she's a smoker: “Occasionally. It's an addiction.” She points out that you “live with a lot of complicated emotions as an actor, and they whirl around you and create havoc at times.” [Harper's Bazaar]

The “complicated emotions” that can help make good actors so outstanding can also be a precedent to addictive behavior.

In the book Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential, Lisa, age 14, talks about being given Valium by a doctor: “Taking pills or smoking a joint helped get me through the day.” She said gifted kids take drugs “To dull themselves.. there is so much of the wrong kind of stimulation going on around you.”

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., head of the Gifted Development Center in Denver, said in one of her articles, “Creatively gifted children and adults are emotionally intense and have rich inner lives.

"An enhanced capacity for feeling is essential to the production of great art, moving music, high drama, memorable prose and poetry, exquisite performances. It is natural for the gifted to feel deeply and to experience a broad range of emotions.”

Kazimierz Dabrowski, MD, PhD (1902-1980), a Polish psychiatrist and psychologist, developed a personality theory that many current researchers and writers use to help understand highly talented people.

He noted that many gifted and talented people - including actors, of course - may experience ”increased mental excitability, depressions, dissatisfaction with oneself, feelings of inferiority and guilt, states of anxiety, inhibitions, and ambivalences - all symptoms which the psychiatrist tends to label psychoneurotic.”

Successfully dealing with addiction can be invaluable in many ways.

Richard Lewis commented in his memoir, “I have been sober for almost eight years and my life is a billion percent better. Now I don't have the craving for alcohol, I have the craving for clarity and life. It's so much easier now to let the universe take care of itself without thinking like I used to, that I had something to do with it.”

But getting there is usually not easy. Melanie Griffith has said, “Facing my addiction was one of the hardest things I've had to do in my life.”

Lynda Carter has talked about her years of addiction to alcohol as a "genetic predisposition that sort of grabbed hold of me. It was like staring into a deep, dark hole that I thought no one would understand or still love me if I ever admitted it – or (if) the public ever knew about this very shameful part of my life. My family suffered... and I was very good at hiding my problem."

Ewan McGregor also has talked about shame: “I think drinking and being out of control narrows your options in front of the camera. I was just ashamed of myself, really. None of my directors ever said: ‘I’d rather you didn’t drink at work.’ And they must have known. Originally, I was a happy drunk. But later I was miserable because it’s a depressant.”

Jamie Lee Curtis talks about learning to take better care of herself and her feelings: “After five years in recovery I'm getting better at setting limits. I used to hide my resentments in drugs and alcohol. Now I've had to figure out other ways to handle them... now I know that to care for myself I must set limits.” [From the book Positive Energy by Judith Orloff M.D.]

Drew Barrymore, who was infamously abusing drugs and alcohol as a teen, has said of her rehab experience: “How do we not hurt ourselves? How do we not hurt those around us? When I came out of there, I felt so full of wisdom, so peaceful."

Her famed ancestor John Barrymore (1882-1942) apparently thought of alcohol as part of his “process” as an actor: "There are lots of methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass and some cracked ice."

Your attitude about using/abusing can be critical to what you do, or don’t do about it. Brett Butler once said, “I still do basically think of... addiction as a disease if someone else has it - and if I have it, it's a moral failing. I have to try really hard to be as understanding about myself as someone else. It was either that or I'm dumber than a dog... I lost a lot and created a great deal of wreckage and don't have anybody to blame for myself.”

Maybe one reason so many intense and sensitive people self-medicate is to “dampen” the internal and external condemnations of those “symptoms” that Dabrowski and others say can indicate a capacity for achieving higher levels of personal development.

Creative expression can help many people - whether professional artists or not - deal with mental health challenges underlying addiction.

Eric Maisel, Ph.D., a therapist and creativity coach, is working on a book with a "complete recovery program for creative people that takes into account the difficulties of creating and the advantages of creating," he says in our interview: Ten Zen Seconds for Purpose, Power and Calm.

He says the technique in his current book Ten Zen Seconds, "while not a complete recovery program by any means, can prove a useful tool in any recovery program, as it supports mindfulness and awareness, which keeps sobriety on the table, and meaning-making and action, which keeps creating on the table."

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Statistics from article: Cognitive Therapy of Substance Abuse: Theoretical Rationale

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books:

Responsible Drinking - by Marc F. Kern, Ph.D.

Postcards from the Edge - by Carrie Fisher

Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience, Including
Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, Anais Nin, Maya Angelou, Billie Holiday, Nina Hagen, Carrie Fisher, and Others - by Michael Horowitz, editor

more resources:

Addiction Info - multiplle articles etc

Addiction

Alcohol

addiction resources: articles sites...

addiction resources: books

Related article: Gifted, Talented, Addicted, by Douglas Eby [more articles]

The Inner Actor blog

More Acting pages

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