Drew Blyth Barrymore (born February 22, 1975) is an Emmy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated American actress and film producer, the youngest member of the Barrymore family of American actors.
Biography
Barrymore was born in Culver City, California, the daughter of American actor John Drew Barrymore and Ildiko Jaid Barrymore, an aspiring actress born in a displaced persons camp in Brannenburg, West Germany to Hungarian World War II refugees. Her parents divorced after she was born. She has a half-brother John Blyth Barrymore, also an actor, and two half-sisters, Blyth Dolores Barrymore and Brahma (Jessica) Blyth Barrymore. Her paternal great-great-grandfather, John Drew, the actor, was Irish-born, and immigrated to the US, in the 19th Century.
Barrymore was born into the acting profession, coming from a long line of acting talent stretching back nearly 200 years; her great-great grandparents John Drew, Louisa Lane Drew, her great-grandparents Maurice Barrymore, Georgiana Drew, Maurice Costello and Mae Costello, and her grandparents John Barrymore and Dolores Costello were all highly successful actors; John Barrymore was arguably the most acclaimed actor of his generation. She is the grand-niece of Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore (whom Winston Churchill once proposed to), and Helene Costello, and the great grandniece of John Drew, Jr., actress Louisa Drew, and silent film actor/writer/director Sidney Drew. Her father and half-brother are also actors. She is also the god-daughter of director Steven Spielberg.
Barrymore's career began when she was eleven months old: she auditioned for a dog food commercial. When she was bitten by her canine co-star, the producers were afraid she would cry, but she merely laughed, and was hired for the job. She made her film debut in Altered States (1980).
In the wake of this sudden stardom, Barrymore endured a notoriously troubled childhood, already a regular at the famed Studio 54 when she was a little girl, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol by the time she was 9, smoking marijuana at 10, and snorting cocaine at 13. She was in rehab at age 13 and a second time at 14. Barrymore later described this period of her life in her 1990 autobiography, Little Girl Lost. Her nightlife and constant partying became a popular subject with the media.
Barrymore used her new-found role as a sex symbol to stage a career comeback playing a manipulative, evil teenage seductress in Poison Ivy (1992), which became a box office failure, but was popular on video and cable. She posed nude for the January 1995 issue of Playboy. Spielberg gave her a quilt for her 20th birthday with a note that read, "Cover yourself up". Enclosed were copies of her Playboy pictures, with the pictures altered by his art department so that she appeared fully clothed. She would eventually appear nude in five of her movies during this period.
She made a comeback in the successful 1996 horror film Scream. Barrymore has continued to be highly bankable, and a top box office draw.
Barrymore was married to Welsh bartender turned bar owner, Jeremy Thomas, from March 20 to April 28, 1994, and to comedian Tom Green from July 7, 2001 to October 15, 2002. Green filed for divorce in December 2001.
In March 2007, former magazine editor Jane Pratt claimed on her Sirius Satellite Radio show that she had a romance with Barrymore in the middle 1990s. This was after Barrymore's own 2003 admission that she considered herself bisexual, commenting: "I don't think I could ever just solely be with a woman...It's just not enough for me."
Her first name, Drew, was the maiden name of her paternal great-grandmother, Georgiana Drew; her middle name, Blyth, was the original surname of the dynasty founded by her great-grandfather, Maurice Barrymore.
