Steven Spielberg: ‘I felt very helpless’ when Drew Barrymore asked me to be her dad
nypost.comtold Vulture that Spielberg, 76, is “the only person in my life to this day that ever was a parental figure.”After Spielberg told a 7-year-old Barrymore that he couldn’t be her real father, he agreed to be her godfather.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker recalled feeling “helpless” over her troubled life at home while they were filming the 1982 movie.“She was staying up way past her bedtime, going to places she should have only been hearing about, and living a life at a very tender age that I think robbed her of her childhood,” he told Vulture. “Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad.
I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”Barrymore’s actual father, the late actor John Drew Barrymore, was an abusive alcoholic.“Talk about someone who was not a careerist,” Barrymore said of her father. “He was like, ‘I will burn this fucking dynasty to the ground.’”The Barrymore acting “dynasty” moreso started with her grandfather, John Barrymore — who is thought of as one of the greatest Shakespeare of his time — along with his siblings Ethel and Lionel.During the making of “E.T.,” Spielberg wanted to make sure the magic was kept alive for a young Barrymore since she thought the extraterrestrial was real, shooting the movie in strict continuity to not crush her.
She once spotted people operating the puppet behind a wall and asked Spielberg to make them leave the set.“I didn’t want to burst the bubble,” Spielberg shared. “So I simply said, ‘It’s okay, E.T.
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