Actor John Malkovich was in his 30s when 12-year-old Drew Barrymore came up to him at a Los Angeles club in the late 1980s and praised his acting. Recalling the encounter with Barrymore on her talk show, he remembered admiring her work while wondering how a child had ended up there.
His first response was about her performance in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: “Well, if I’m ever half as good as you were in E.T., I’ll feel self-actualised.”
Barrymore’s explanation for her presence was brief: “I was a club kid.”
Barrymore became famous at 7. Her mother and childhood manager, Jaid, took her to Hollywood parties, where she was exposed to alcohol and drugs.
Her childhood included nights at Studio 54 and Limelight, and she entered rehab at 13.
Steven Spielberg, who directed her in E.T., spoke in 2023 about watching her grow up around adults. “She was staying up way past her bedtime, going to places she should have only been hearing about, and living a life at a very tender age that I think robbed her of her childhood.”
He gave her a cat named after her E.T. character and took her to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. But his ability to intervene had limits: “Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”
Barrymore described him as “the only person in my life to this day that ever was a parental figure.”
Barrymore stopped drinking in 2019 and publicly discussed her sobriety in 2021. Reflecting on her childhood treatment on her show, she said: “And it can’t be embarrassing. It has to be our strengths, it has to be something that we can be proud of because we overcame it and we look back with honour and humour.”