She started smoking aged nine, was drinking alcohol by 11, using marijuana at 12 and snorting cocaine at 13 but Drew Barrymore isn’t going to hide her troubled childhood from her own daughter.
In an emotional interview with Oprah Winfrey, Drew, 37, said she plans to tell Olive all about her drug use when the four-month-old grows up.
She said she doesn’t believe her daughter will follow the same path because she will be there to support her in a way Drew’s own mother, Jaid Barrymore, never was.
“I will absolutely instil in her that you cannot be ashamed of the journey that it took, you know, to get where you are if you are proud of yourself,” she said.
“But I will also try to instil in her that I did not have guidance and that is why I lived my life that way. And although I am proud of it and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life regretting it, there is no option for her to take that path because she has guidance.”
Drew, 37, is married to Olive’s father Will Kopelman, but her love life hasn’t always been so settled.
She got engaged to Leland Hayward at just 16, but the relationship ended before she walked up the aisle. The following year she got engaged again, this time to actor Jamie Walters, but split from him after eight months.
She married Los Angeles bar owner Jeremy Thomas in 1994, but the union broke down just two months later.
Her second marriage to comedian Tom Green in 2001 lasted longer, ending in divorce just over a year after the wedding.
Drew said the main motivation for her to finally settle down was to provide a stable life for Olive.
“I will be there at 3pm in the school line waiting to pick her up, that’s first and foremost,” she said.
“I think that’s as a kid what I craved the most, was just believing that was going to be there. Being there in that school line. I think the world offers so many wonderful varieties of obstacles but that shouldn’t be one for kids — the worry that my parent won’t be there.”
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