Sabotaging with drugs & drink
Robert Downey Jr. has been clean and sober for more than a year, according to a recent news article, and admits about his long history of drug abuse, “For years I took pride in being resilient,” he says. “But that turned into this guy who can get hit by a brickbat every morning and still look kind of cute. I mean, there’s ‘ready to be ready,’ and then there’s waking up in the morning feeling like you’ve been hit in the back with a sledgehammer.”
He is “very very very high maintenance,” he said. “Even without being the inventor of any of my own impediments from this day forward, it’s still tough, it’s still chaotic.”
Another talented actor, Michelle Rodriguez [of tv series “Lost”] recently was released from a Hawaii jail after being found guilty of drunken driving. According to a news story, when she was in court, she blamed steroid injections to treat allergies for making her “manic.” She said she was thankful for her arrest “because of the fact that I didn’t acknowledge my own behavior and how sporadic it was until all hell broke loose in my life.”
That is one of the most insidious aspects of drug and alcohol abuse - losing our capacity to be objective about the destructive results, both on others and ourselves, until it reaches extreme levels.
Turner Classic Movies is running a biography this week on Bette Davis, arguably one of the most gifted and expressive actors, but whose private life was chaotic, including a marriage to an alcoholic, and being emotionally abusive toward her daughter.
Davis reportedly suffered ill health due to alcohol and cigarette abuse. In many of her films she smoked, as well as in real life; she often lit up on talk shows, and discounted it saying, “If I did not smoke a cigarette, people would not know who I was.”
More stories about contemporary actors and artists can be found on the page Celebrity Addiction News and in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted
