How Lindsay Lohan hit rock bottom, and survived

Telegraph

11 hours ago

Just like Britney Spears, Monica Lewinsky, Princess Diana and Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan is a woman who was, for a long time, turned inside out for sport – by the media, by her fans, by her own mother. World-famous by 18 after starring in The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Mean Girls – a Disney princess under a curse – Lohan suffered all the projected humiliation and fury the public, through their paparazzi avatars, could heap on her. The tabloids called her La Vida Lohan (a play on la vida loca – 'the crazy life'). And yet, she has, if not thrived, survived.
She is not the serious dramatic actress she should be – I would like to see her Medea, her Lady Macbeth – and she is not rich. But she is alive at 39, she has a child and she is working, which means she is sober. (I say no more. Everyone has a right to privacy, even beautiful women.)
She is three films into a Netflix deal, and now she headlines Freakier Friday, the sequel to Freaky Friday (2003), with Jamie Lee Curtis. These films meddle with time: the old become young, and the young old. They are charming and flimsy, and they suit Lohan perfectly.
The road from child stardom is littered with corpses: few survive the journey because, when forced to be an adult so young, the child cannot grow up. Lohan is the child star that lived and, at 39, she is both young and old. That is her gift, too: to project a lifetime in a glance.
New Yorker film critic Richard Brody thinks Lohan one of the best screen actors around: in 2021 he named her performance in Mean Girls the 11th best performance of the century. 'The sheer force of Lohan's personality, the enormous character that bursts even in repose from each glance and each word, is the star quality that classic Hollywood actors had and that seemed to have dwindled over time, as technique became valued over presence'.
She was, like many actors, who revel in trying on other people's lives, born into trauma. Her father, Michael, a sometime violent criminal, left her mother when Lohan was three: the year her career began as a child model. (Though they later reunited.) She wrote a song about him in 2005, Confessions of a Broken Heart, which included the heartbreaking line: 'Daughter to father, daughter to father / Tell me the truth, did you ever love me?'
She directed the music video, set in a replica of her childhood home in Merrick, Long Island, placed in the windows of a department store so everyone could see. Her father who, we learn from the TV in the video, is released from treatment for addiction, has crashed his car into a telephone pole, and threatens her mother, Dina; her younger sister Aliana (playing herself) weeps in a ballet costume.
Lohan sits in couture on the bathroom floor and weeps too, and the window glass shatters. Neither parent could shield her from her fame and its pitfalls: Dina was her manager, and employee. (Freaky Friday, young and old, again.) She also, perhaps unconsciously, exploited her famous daughter: at one point she tried to set up a reality TV show to follow Lohan into rehab. What followed was inevitable.
In 2006, Lohan arguably hit rock bottom, professionally at least. She was at the height of her partying, and filming what would be known as a total turkey, Georgia Rule, with Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman. She was constantly turning up late, or not at all, to set, costing the production a reported $375,000. Eventually, the chief executive of the production company had had enough, and set a furious personal letter to her suite at the Chateau Marmont.
'To date, your actions on Georgia Rule have been discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional,' he wrote. 'You have acted like a spoilt child and in so doing have alienated many of your co-workers and endangered the quality of this picture.' The letter was then leaked by gossip site The Smoking Gun, and gave her already-flimsy reputation a fatal blow – Lohan became virtually uninsurable in her industry, which might explain why, for decades, her career remained in tatters.
In January 2007, Lohan spent the first of six court-ordered stints in rehab; she would spend more than 250 days in rehabilitation by 2014. Between 2007 and 2014, she spent 14 days in prison for drinking under the influence – she crashed her car into a shrubbery and leapt into a stranger's car to chase the mother of her former personal assistant. (In court she had 'f--- u' inscribed on her fingernail.) Cocaine was found in her car and her body. She exhibited signs of anorexia. A judge made her wear a Scram bracelet (a device to monitor alcohol consumption) – in 2013's Inappropriate Comedy she dressed up like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch while wearing the Scram bracelet and murdered paparazzi with a gun. The scene included a shot of her crotch from below: the definitive comment on Lohan's relationship with the tabloids. They wanted to see everything, and she let them.
Lohan was clearly unwell, but the mocking was relentless: she was only a doll, after all. Saturday Night Live made her play Hermione Granger in a low-cut top. (Considering the treatment of celebrities at the time, presumably the joke was supposed to be on her, but when I watched it this week, it wasn't. She was Cady of Mean Girls again: the luminous straight woman. Even so, it was written by her mentor, Tina Fey, who should have been kinder to her troubled friend.) Lohan's first love, the actor Wilmer Valderrama, told The Howard Stern Show '[her breasts] were real' and 'she's a big fan of waxing'.
Appearing on Late Show with David Letterman in 2013 to promote Scary Movie 5, Letterman asks her: 'Aren't you supposed to be in rehab now?' 'May 2nd,' she replies. 'How long will you be in rehab?' 'Three months.' 'How many times have you been in rehab?' 'Several.' 'How will this time be different? What are they rehabbing? What is on their list?' 'We didn't discuss this in the pre-interview…' 'I wish you had come out with the tags [Scram bracelet] on your dress though,' he ponders. 'I know,' says Lohan, 'it would be so funny.'
Addiction is dependent on shame. Letterman piled it on her, and the audience laughed.
In rehab, fellow addicts chanted the nickname that a friend of Paris Hilton's had coined for Lohan: 'fire crotch'. Her stint as artistic advisor for Ungaro was called 'an embarrassment' and a 'train wreck' by Women's Wear Daily. For I Know Who Killed Me (2007), a horror film about a stripper with a dual personality, she won two Golden Raspberry awards for worst performance – one for each personality.
All of this was considered newsworthy but, when Lohan appeared to be assaulted by her then boyfriend, the Russian businessman Egor Tarabasov, on a beach in Mykonos in 2016, there was almost nothing. By contrast, in 2006 a photograph of Lohan with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton appeared on the front of the New York Post under the headline 'Bimbo summit'. It was vicious: an apogee of the popular misogyny of the time. Spears and Lohan had worked in popular entertainment since childhood. They were, despite everything, professionals.
Slowly, she got better. She did some wan documentaries and then Netflix called with a deal: they called it the Lindsay Lohanaissance. The material – Falling for Christmas; Irish Wish; Our Little Secret – is hardly radical, but Lohan has it down perfectly. The acting is easy; the living is hard.
Even when sick, Lohan was self-mocking and self-aware. She played Elizabeth Taylor in Liz & Dick (2012) and recreated Marilyn Monroe's final photoshoot for New York Magazine in 2008. Lohan was, at 22, playing Monroe at 36 – meddling with time again. It was her doomed period, and I wonder if the idea of closeness to Monroe comforted her – few women know what Lohan went through, but Monroe would. Lohan has a tattoo of a Monroe quote on her arm, which says, 'I restore myself when I'm alone' and she even named her (equally doomed) leggings line after Monroe's birthday: 6126.
But of all the doomed screen goddesses, Lohan reminds me most of Judy Garland. She has the same canny sweetness (Taylor was never sweet); the air of eternal, yet weary, youth, like a female Peter Pan; the instinctive professionalism (Monroe, though glorious, never had that); the joy. Garland, a child of vaudevillians, was born in a trunk. Lohan was doing commercials from three. I watched some of them. Even then she had a joy to her, a willingness. The material was bad – it was a jelly advert – but she elevated it.
In the end, Lindsay Lohan's story told us more about us than her. Perhaps now, in homage to Freakier Friday, this should be reversed. I can't wait for her Medea.