Facebook · IMDB · Instagram · TheMovieDB.com · TikTok · TV Maze · X (Twitter)

Producer · Actor

1975-02-22 · Culver City, California, USA · Female

53 series in the catalog

Drew Blythe Barrymore (born February 22, 1975) is an American actress. A member of the Barrymore family of actors, she has received multiple awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe Award, an Emmy Award, and an Actor Award. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2023.

Barrymore rose to prominence as a child star in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Firestarter (1984). She established herself as a Hollywood leading actress with roles in Poison Ivy (1992), Boys on the Side (1995) and Scream (1996). Barrymore appeared in the franchise Charlie's Angels (2000), and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003). She has also starred a number of times with Adam Sandler including in The Wedding Singer (1998) and 50 First Dates (2004). Other notable film credits include Batman Forever (1995), Donnie Darko (2001), and He's Just Not That Into You (2009).

Barrymore won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Film for her portrayal of Edith Bouvier Beale in HBO's Grey Gardens (2009), played Sheila Hammond on the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2019), and hosts the daytime talk show The Drew Barrymore Show (2020–present).

Barrymore is the founder of the production company Flower Films and has starred in several of its projects. She made her directorial debut with Whip It (2009). She launched a range of cosmetics under the Flower banner in 2013. Her other business ventures include a range of wines, homeware, and clothing. She has released four New York Times bestselling books, including the memoir Little Girl Lost (1990) and the photobook Find It in Everything (2014).

Ancestry

Barrymore was born on February 22, 1975, in Culver City, California, an inner suburb of Los Angeles. Her father was actor John Drew Barrymore. Her mother, Jaid Barrymore was an actor as well. Her mother was born in a displaced persons camp in Brannenburg, West Germany, to Hungarian World War II refugees. Through her father, Barrymore has three older half-siblings, including actor John Blyth Barrymore. Her parents divorced in 1984.

Barrymore was born into an acting family. All of her paternal great-grandparents, Maurice and Georgie Drew Barrymore, Maurice and Mae Costello (née Altschuk), and her paternal grandparents, John Barrymore and Dolores Costello, were actors, with John being arguably the most acclaimed actor of his generation. Barrymore is a niece of Diana Barrymore, a grandniece of Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore and Helene Costello, and a great-great-granddaughter of Irish-born John and English-born Louisa Lane Drew, all of whom were also actors. She is a great-grandniece of Broadway idol John Drew Jr. and silent film actor, writer and director Sidney Drew.

Barrymore's godmothers are actress Sophia Loren and Lee Strasberg's widow, Anna Strasberg; Barrymore described her relationship with the latter as one that "would become so important to me as a kid because she was so kind and nurturing." Her godfather is filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

Barrymore's first name, Drew, was the maiden name of her paternal great-grandmother Georgie Drew, and her middle name, Blythe, was derived from the birth surname (Blyth) of her great-grandfather who later took the stage name of Maurice Barrymore. In her 1991 autobiography Little Girl Lost, Barrymore recounted early memories of her abusive father, who left the family when she was six months old. She and her father never had a significant relationship and seldom spoke.

Childhood

Barrymore grew up on Poinsettia Place in West Hollywood, until she moved to Sherman Oaks at the age of seven. In her 2015 memoir Wildflower, she says she spoke "like a valley girl" because she grew up in Sherman Oaks. She moved back to West Hollywood on becoming emancipated at age 14. She attended elementary school at Fountain Day School in West Hollywood and Country School. In the wake of her sudden stardom, Barrymore endured a notoriously troubled childhood. She was a regular at Studio 54 as a young girl, and her nightlife and constant partying became a popular subject with the media.

She was placed in rehab at thirteen, and spent eighteen months at Van Nuys Behavioral Health Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill. A suicide attempt at age fourteen put her back in rehab, followed by a three-month stay with singer David Crosby and his wife. The stay was precipitated, Crosby said, because she "needed to be around some people that were committed to sobriety." Barrymore described this period of her life for Little Girl Lost. After a successful juvenile court petition for emancipation, she moved into her own apartment at the age of fifteen.

Career

Early roles and breakthrough as a child actor (1980s)

Barrymore appeared in a dog food commercial when she was eleven months old. After her film debut with a small role in Altered States, she played Gertie in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Director Steven Spielberg felt she had the right imagination for the role after she impressed him with a story that she led a punk rock band. E.T. was the highest-grossing film of the 1980s and made Barrymore one of the most famous child actors of the time. She won the Young Artist Award for Best Young Supporting Actress and was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the British Academy Film Awards. In the eighth season of Saturday Night Live, she became the youngest person to guest-host the series at 7 years old. Barrymore said that "nobody treated me like a kid there" and she felt no different than any other cast member despite her age.

In the 1984 film adaptation of Stephen King's 1980 novel Firestarter, Barrymore played a girl with pyrokinesis, and the target of a secret government agency known as The Shop. That year, she also played a young girl divorcing her famous parents in Irreconcilable Differences and was nominated for her first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote: "Barrymore is the right actress for this role precisely because she approaches it with such grave calm." She starred in the anthology horror film Cat's Eye, also written by King. It received positive reviews and Barrymore was nominated for a Young Artist Award for Best Leading Young Actress.

Barrymore experienced a troubled youth and acted only intermittently throughout the late 1980s. She next starred in the 1989 romance film See You in the Morning. Vincent Canby of The New York Times criticized the "fashionable phoniness" of the film, but positively singled out Barrymore. In Far from Home, she played a teenager who gets stranded with her father in a small, remote desert town. The film went largely unnoticed by audiences and received negative reviews from critics, who dismissed the sexual portrayal of her role.

Teenage stardom (1990s)

Barrymore's rebelliousness played itself out on screen and in print. She played a poor teenage girl in Poison Ivy (1992), which was a box-office bomb, but was popular on video and cable. Her character Ivy was ranked at on the list of the top 26 "bad girls" of all time by Entertainment Weekly. Barrymore was 17 when she posed nude with her then-fiancé, actor Jamie Walters, for the cover of the July issue of Interview magazine; she also appeared nude in pictures inside the issue.

In Guncrazy, Barrymore played a teenager who kills her abusive stepfather. Variety remarked that she "pulls [her character] off impressively", and Barrymore was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film. She played the younger sister of a murdered ballerina in No Place to Hide (1993) and a writer followed by what is apparently her evil twin in Doppelganger. Both films were panned by critics and failed to find an audience. She appeared in the western film Bad Girls (1994), which follows four former prostitutes on the run following a justifiable homicide and prison escape. Roger Ebert, in his review for the film, wrote for…