Richard Dreyfuss
Suddenly he had a lot of money and fame and no clue how to handle it. He began drinking heavily and eventually got into drugs. His luck at the box-office changed after Good-bye Girl and he had a string of flops: The Big Fix, The Competition, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and The Buddy System. His career was in a nose-dive and to make it worse he had made a lot of enemies during his bender phase and there were no allies to help him pull out of it. His work and his personal life careened out of control with bad movies, bad behavior and lots of booze and drugs.
Finally it all came to a head in 1982 when he crashed his Mercedes into a palm tree on Benedict Canyon Drive. He had to be pulled from his car by paramedics and was arrested for possession of cocaine and Percodan, a pain killer. For weeks after the accident he had a vision of a little girl. Since he had no children he couldn't figure out who the girl was. He decided she was the child he might have killed, or the child he was yet to have. That thought made him quit drugs and alcohol cold turkey and take a hard look at his life. Early the next year he got married to Jeremy Rains, a TV writer / producer, and did in fact have a daughter, Emily.
He disappeared for several years and many wrote him off as another Hollywood burnout. But during this time he was rebuilding himself. "The truth is, there is only one story and the answers lead back to it all the time. I didn't just stop drinking. My whole life changed, it really did. I sobered up. That's a terrible phrase for something larger than that. It's a larger experience than that. I rebuilt my life in another manner, put myself together in a way that I didn't expect to. When I sobered up, I found myself to be different. Perhaps I had lied to myself all those years about this love of acting; maybe I pronounced it too much. I don't need it, I don't need to do that anymore. I don't need to say that anymore. I'm an actor, I act. I don't lust, I act. I don't obsess, I act. I have a distance from those phrases that I used to say
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