  Drew Barrymore walks the red carpet for premiere of "Whip It" during Toronto International Film Festival, September 13, 2009. (Alex Urosevic/SunMedia) |
It isn’t easy being Drew Barrymore.
Cute and daffy as the star of various romantic comedies, Barrymore is also a canny filmmaker who has produced 10 movies and now directs her first feature film. She’s smart, beautiful and successful, and she’s had to prove herself since she was 15.
Her first film is Whip It, a coming-of-age story about a girl who finds her niche in roller derby. The movie is an energetic slice of life with a terrific cast — Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig and Juliette Lewis. Barrymore works on both sides of the camera by also taking a role as one of the roller derby women. She has described her role by saying, “I selfishly wanted to play this character who is a bit of a dichotomy, sort of half hippie, half-chick-with-anger-issues,” she says. “I can identify with that, as part of me is very laid-back but another part of me really enjoys action.”
The actress, 34, spent a few days in Toronto earlier this month to promote Whip It during the big film festival, where her movie had a glittery premiere. Barrymore has claimed that as she read Whip It she knew it would be the movie she wanted for her directorial debut.
“It felt like something I’d been practicing for my whole life.”
Previously, she put it like this: “I took every little detail that I had ever seen and learned and experienced and soaked up, my cultural and emotional piggy bank, and I took that piggy bank and broke it all over the floor for this film.”
In Whip It, Ellen Page stars as Bliss Cavendar, a high school senior in small town Texas whose mom hopes she’ll be a beauty pageant contestant. It’s the sort of opportunity a woman can use, her mom thinks, but Bliss isn’t convinced. When she experiences the female camaraderie and physical freedom of a roller derby team, Bliss finds something she can call her own.
Barrymore talks about Whip It with an almost maternal pride and concern. She says the movie had special appeal to her on three levels: It has a strong mother-daughter story, it says you can be your own hero, and it concerns a girl who finds her own inner strength.
You could view that as Barrymore’s biography in a nutshell.
Barrymore talks about the mother/daughter relationship in Whip It — between Page and Harden — saying, “I know what mothers and daughters go through, so it was exciting for me to be able to put personal experience or personal heartache into that.”
Barrymore didn’t want any illogical developments or miraculous happy endings for the mother and daughter, either, “Because that’s just BS. That’s not really how life works. I used to be so obsessed with happy endings when I was in my 20s, and now that I’m in my 30s I just really appreciate a good day... I didn’t want a Hollywood ending, didn’t want it to all wrap up.”
Barrymore’s take on a mother-daughter relationship would likely be a bit different from most. To recap her history, Barrymore is the granddaughter of John Barrymore, the leading light of the legendary Barrymore family. Her roots in acting go back to her great-great grandmother, Louisa Lane, an actress and theatre owner who once starred in a Shakespearian production with John Wilkes Booth.
Acting is in her blood. So are other things — her grandfather and her father, John Drew Barrymore, had major substance-abuse issues, as did she. At any rate, Barrymore was raised solely by her mother, Ildiko Jaid Mako.
That worked so well that Barrymore went to court at 15 and won emancipation as an adult. At that young age she had to build her life back up from nothing after she had crashed and burned as an adolescent. Barrymore was acting from birth in commercials, and by age seven was a movie star thanks to her starring role in the 1982 blockbuster E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. She even hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time that year. By age 13 she was in rehab, and working at menial jobs by 15. Her book, Little Girl Lost, which was published when she was 14, details her own addictions.
Despite their differences, Barrymore and her mother Jaid patched up their relationship a few years ago. By that time, Barrymore had emerged, triumphant, on the other side of self-reinvention. She founded Flower Films at age 19, and with friend and business partner Nancy Juvonen has produced the Charlie Angels movies, Duplex, Donnie Darko, He’s Just Not That Into You and Never Been Kissed, among others.
As a grown-up actress, Barrymore is best known as the cutie lead in such romantic comedies as 50 First Dates, The Wedding Singer and Music & Lyrics, but Barrymore’s true acting chops can be seen in such films as Riding In Cars With Boys or the more recent HBO outing, Grey Gardens, for which she won an Emmy nomination. The global box-office gross of her movies is closing in on $3 billion.
Like the heroine of Whip It, Barrymore says she has come to very much value the friendships she’s had through thick and thin.
“And I like the idea of finding your tribe, because I think that’s been such a key essential to my survival,” she says. “Just finding a group of people I work with, and who I love and have so much pleasure being around and collaborating with.
“I think roller derby is the perfect metaphor for that.”
Love, marriage a bumpy road
She’s been on People Magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful list, she was the face of Cover Girl makeup and she’s ultra-glam in those Gucci advertisements, but that doesn’t mean Drew Barrymore has been lucky in love.
Like many people raised by wolves, Barrymore has had plenty of ups and downs in her romantic relationships. She was engaged to be married twice as a teenager, and then leapt into marriage at age 19 to Jeremy Thomas, a bartender. That marriage lasted a few weeks. In 1999 she married comic Tom Green. That second marriage went a full five months.
More recently, Barrymore dated Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti for several years before making Justin Long her on-again, off-again main squeeze.
Other past boyfriends are alleged to include Luke Wilson, Balthazar Getty, Edward Norton and Sam Rockwell.
Barrymore often has said she is bisexual, and her relationships with other women are said to include publisher Jane Pratt and Courtney Love.
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
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