Drew Barrymore Biography

Drew Barrymore was seven years old when she snagged a plum role in Steven Spielberg‘s hit film E.T. (1982).

Yet she was already a member of the famous Barrymore acting clan; her great-uncle Lionel tormented Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, and her great-aunt Ethel and grandfather John Barrymore also were popular thespians earlier in the century.

For Drew Barrymore, early success bred excess: by age 10 she was using alcohol and marijuana, by 13 she was in rehab, and by 17 she was posing nude for Interview magazine. She described this period in a 1990 memoir, Little Girl Lost.

Despite her tabloid-fodder personal life, in her twenties Barrymore became a prolific and respected actress in films like Boys on the Side (1995, with Matthew McConaughey), The Wedding Singer (1998, with Adam Sandler), and Never Been Kissed (1999, with Jessica Alba).

She also starred with Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels (2000) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), and got involved behind the scenes with a production company, Flower Films.

Barrymore has since been in front of the camera in the Flower productions Fever Pitch (2005, based loosely on a book by Nick Hornby), Music and Lyrics (2007, with Hugh Grant) and He’s Just Not That Into You (2009, with Jennifer Aniston).

Behind the scenes, Barrymore is an executive producer of several television shows, including 2011’s Charlie’s Angels series, the more successful series Santa Clarita Diet (2017-19) and her own television talkshow, The Drew Barrymore Show (launched in 2020).