Drew Barrymore would grow up knowing the Barrymore name as both an inheritance and a weight. She knew she came from greatness; she also knew, from early enough that the knowledge seems to have been ambient rather than explicitly taught, that the greatness and the self-destruction in her family were not separable things. The talent and the addiction were woven together. The fame and the ruin arrived in the same package.
She would spend her childhood and early adolescence living out a compressed version of that family script, moving through the stages of substance use and instability at a speed that seemed almost designed to demonstrate how efficiently a child could absorb the patterns of the adults around her.
## The Youngest Player: How a Child Became a Star Before She Could Understand What That Meant
Drew Barrymore made her professional debut at eleven months old in a dog food commercial. The family needed money. She was available. There was, from the very beginning, something both poignant and troubling about the ease with which a baby was installed in the working world — as if the boundary between Drew-the-infant and Drew-the-professional had never been particularly solid in the first place.
She had a small role in the 1980 film Altered States when she was five, a film of psychological horror and surrealism that was emphatically not designed for a five-year-old’s sensibilities or comprehension. The role was minor. It established a pattern: the world of adult filmmaking was not a place she was protected from. It was a place where she worked.