Drew Barrymore's unstoppable rise, still

Glory is like the stream. It comes, it goes, then it may come back, more impetuous than before, in unpredictable waves. Sometimes it washes over your ankles, sometimes it slaps you in the face and knocks you over. This is what has happened and continues to happen to Drew Barrymore. Her professional and personal story is complicated. She started working in advertising when she was just 11 months old. Driven to a disorderly life by her mother Jaid, an aspiring actress who wanted fame for her daughter, she entered rehab for the first time at 13. At 14, she attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital. The situation was clearly untenable and at 15 the girl pursued a process to emancipate herself from her parents, moving out on her own and trying to start over on the rubble of her childhood and early adolescence.

Her resume features an impressive variety of film and television genres. From E.T. in 1982 to Charlie's Angels in the early 2000s, a film that had a major impact on the aesthetic of those years. On to Donnie Darko and Never Been Kissed (2001 and 1999 respectively) and on to 50 Times the First Kiss, Write Me a Song. With The Essentials and Santa Clarita Diet distributed by Netflix from 2017 to 2019, there is no shortage of forays into the world of seriality.


Now that she's openly bisexual and has been single for years (she has not publicly dated anyone since her divorce from Will Kopelman in 2016), the actress has decided to follow the path of her other female colleagues (think Busy Phillips, for example, Kelly Clarkson and Jada Pinkett Smith) and devote herself to her own talk show, accurately titled "The Drew Barrymore Show" Her intimate, outspoken manner prompts her to welcome her old friends and beloved viewers and interview them without shoes, sitting on the floor and hugging them. Her kindness and the attitude of a friend to whom one can confess everything or a caring mother did the rest and made her instantly popular on social media. Even users too young to remember her iconic roles in the 1990s have begun to appreciate her. Her sincerity certainly seems refreshing, and the clips from the show are perfect and naturally encourage commenting and sharing, but it's not all about that.




Drew Barrymore is not just a child actress who made it against all odds, or a nice woman who knows how to be popular. Drew Barrymore is the living example that flowers can grow from ashes, that not all personal matters can be dealt with in public, and that even though a woman is famous practically from birth and has endured and experienced unimaginable things, she must and can always strive to be the master of her own life and the narrative around her character again.

The actress has told her side of the story in several books, from Little Girl Lost (1990) to Wildflower (2015), but when it comes to defending her privacy, she does not hesitate to take a swipe at the tabloids and tabloid press with control and determination. The most recent example is this. Just a few days ago, after PageSix ran the headline "Drew Barrymore admits she wishes her mother Jaid was dead: 'I can not wait'" (with a direct reference to Jennette McCury's bestseller "I am Glad My Mother's Dead"), the woman posted a video on Instagram, serious but unsparing. "To all the tabloids out there: you have been playing with my life since I was 13 years old. I never said I wished my mother was dead. How dare you put those words in my mouth. I have been vulnerable and admitted that I am trying to sort out a difficult and painful relationship. I have admitted that it is particularly complicated to do so while the parent in question is still alive," she explained and then concluded, "Do not bend my words and insinuate that I am standing here wishing for my mother's death. I have never said that. I would never say that."


Control is the key word here. As a grown woman who is unfortunately used to some of the antics of the star system, Barrymore claims (and does) that she is in control of what she says, and when she disagrees with the magazines' interpretations, she personally intervenes to correct them or herself. An example to follow!