Trusted Help Available 24/7.
Privacy Guaranteed.
Recently, we did a blog on the stars we lost too soon to addiction. Here, we celebrate celebrities who are maintaining sobriety. It’s good to know that recovery is possible. It gives us hope. So, here are 10 celebs who went to rehab and stayed sober.
#1. Bradley Cooper
Cooper got sober at 29. Of his past substance abuse, he told GQ in the Jan. 2014 issue, “If I continued it, I was really going to sabotage my whole life.” Nowadays, he says, “I don’t drink or do drugs anymore,” he told People recently. “Being sober helps a great deal … I remember looking at my life, my apartment, my dogs [when I was still using], and I thought, ‘What’s happening?’”
#2. Edie Falco
Despite playing a drug addict on television as the lead in the show Nurse Jackie, Falco has been sober for 21 years. Falco credits AA with helping her achieve and maintain lasting sobriety. She described her recovery to the New York Post as “like learning to ride a bike, you know? You have to get your bearings and you have to stay stable. And balanced.”
#3. Matthew Perry
The “Friends” star has been sober since completing rehab in the late ’90s for an addiction to Vicodin. In May 2013, he told ABC News, “The thing that I’m most proud of in my life is that if a stranger came up to me and said, ‘I can’t stop drinking. I can’t stop drinking. Can you help me?’ I can say, ‘Yes, I can help you.’”
#4. Eminem
After battling addiction to drugs and alcohol, Eminem went to rehab and got sober several years ago. He told Vibe, “You gotta remember I hadn’t recorded a song sober in seven years. So it took me awhile to even feel like I could record a song sober … I don’t know the last time I shot a video sober, without drinking or taking anything. It’s been years.”
#5. Michael J. Fox
After first receiving the devastating diagnosis of early onset Parkinson’s disease, Fox admitted that he turned to alcohol to deal with it, rather than seeking treatment for the degenerative disorder. “My first reaction to [the diagnosis] was to start drinking heavily.”
Of his drinking, Fox says, “I used to drink to party, but then I was drinking alone…Every day.”
Self-medicating with alcohol “was a knife fight in a closet, where I just didn’t have my tools to deal with it,” Fox said. He says treatment helped him to get clear.
#6. Colin Farrell
“Seven years sober. I’m really grateful. It’s really lovely to be present in my life,” he told Ellen. “I was terrified [of being sober] because, I’m not saying I was a great actor before or a great actor since, but I was terrified that whatever my capacity was as an actor beforehand, however little or large — it would completely disappear.”
Farrell checked into an addiction treatment center in December 2005 for an addiction to recreational drugs and painkillers. Of the time he spent in active addiction, “There was an energy that was created, a character that was created, that no doubt benefited me. And then there was a stage where it all began to crumble around me.”
#7. Jack Osbourne
Most of us are familiar with Kelly Osbourne’s struggle with addiction and subsequent sobriety. But did you know that her brother, Jack, is also a recovering addict? By the age of 14, Jack was drinking regularly and had started smoking pot. In April 2003, he was admitted to a child psychiatric ward for an addiction to OxyContin. Osbourne says he continued with his substance abuse until he realized that he “never wants to feel this way ever again” and admitted himself into an adolescent psychiatric ward. From there, he went to an adolescent rehab in Malibu. Jack Osbourne has been clean and sober ever since. He is now married with a daughter and is coping with a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis.
#8. Keith Urban
Urban went into treatment for cocaine and alcohol addiction. He had a relapse around the time he met Nicole Kidman but, has been sober for six years now. “The truth is that I wasn’t even aware of where it was at in my life and how it was just going to come down and take me down like it did,” he told Ellen in 2010. “I was probably in such a state of denial that I consciously wasn’t aware of it.” Urban has been to rehab three times.
#9. Gerard Butler
Butler quit drinking 15 years ago and a few years ago went to rehab for a prescription painkiller addiction.
Butler began taking prescription painkillers after becoming injured while shooting the movie Shattered in 2007. He says of the pills, “I started taking more. And I started taking them very quickly.” He says he sought treatment through a rehab before it got too out of hand. Butler has been clean and sober ever since.
#10. Nell Carter
The star from Gimme a Break! first sought treatment in the form of a detoxification facility around 1985. Some years later, she went to rehab for cocaine, with the help from a good friend, Liza Minnelli – Judy Garland’s daughter, from which she recovered. She died relatively young from various health problems but, she died clean and sober.
If you or someone you love is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, please call toll-free 1-800-951-6135.
Sources:
http://www.thefix.com/content/celebrity-rehab-deaths-cast-success-stories7090
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/celebrities-sober-straight-edge_n_4115017.html