This article mentions substance abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault.
Celebrities are often associated with glitz, glamour, and seemingly perfect lives, but behind the red carpets, designer clothes, and flashing cameras, many have endured heartbreaking struggles that most of us couldn’t even fathom.
From unimaginable loss to devastatingly traumatic childhoods, these 11 stars have seriously heartbreaking backstories:
1. At age 71, Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest and most famous people on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $4 billion. However, she has always been incredibly open about her difficult start in life, where she spent most of her childhood being raised in poverty by her grandmother, who was so poor that Oprah wore dresses made out of potato sacks.
Over the years, Oprah has also revealed that her grandmother was a believer in the adage “spare the rod, spoil the child,” which meant that she was beaten almost daily. In her 2021 book What Happened To You?, the star recalled being "whipped" regularly, adding: "I was beaten for the slightest reasons. Spilled water, a broken glass, the inability to keep quiet or still. My grandmother’s home was a place where children were seen and not heard."
She also alleged that she was raped by her cousin and sexually abused by her mom's boyfirend when she was nine years old, and ran away from home when she was 13. At age 14, Oprah became pregnant, but her son was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. That same year, Oprah’s mom sent her to live with her father in Nashville, and Oprah said that this was when her life started to turn around.
2. Macaulay Culkin is basically the poster boy of child stars, and in adulthood, he has not held back on how difficult his upbringing was.
As one of seven children, Macaulay grew up with his nine-person family squeezed into a four-room apartment in New York City. His parents struggled to make ends meet, and he and his siblings have spoken openly about their parents not even having enough money to put food on the table before Macaulay got his big break at just six years old and became the family’s breadwinner.
In fact, he quickly became one of the most renowned child actors of all time, and was soon rubbing shoulders in showbiz circles — with then-adult Michael Jackson among his closest friends when he was still a kid.
Speaking to New York Magazine in 2001, Macaulay said that his dad even denied him a bed to sleep on in an apparent power trip. He recalled: “I was making God-knows-how-much money, and Kit was making me sleep on the couch, just because he could. Just to let you know who’s in charge, and just to let you know if he doesn’t want you to sleep in a bed, you’re not going to sleep in a bed.”
In the same interview, Macaulay said that his dad would physically abuse him, his mom, and his six siblings, with Macaulay getting the brunt of it because of the amount of time they spent alone together while he was working on movies. He told the Sibling Revelry podcast: “A lot of the time, when I was on the road doing things, it was just me and him, so I was kind of locked in a room with a crazy person.”
In addition, Kit forced Macaulay to keep working despite him repeatedly begging to take a break, with the star only able to step away from the spotlight at 14 because his dad was tied up in a custody trial amid his split from his mom, Patricia Brentrup.
Macaulay also faced heartbreak in 2008 when his sister Dakota, aka Cody, was hit by a car in California and died at age 29, leaving the family devastated. Macaulay paid tribute to his sibling when he and his fiancé, Brenda Song, welcomed their first child in 2021, naming their son Dakota in Cody’s memory.
3. Long before Charlize Theron became the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor who is renowned for her powerful on screen performances, she endured a deeply traumatic childhood in South Africa, which she has has spoken about with remarkable honesty.
Charlize grew up on a farm as an only child in a household full of fear and abuse, with her father suffering from alcoholism and being violent toward her mom. Speaking to Howard Stern in 2017, she said: “I think what more affected me for my adult life that happened in my childhood was the everyday living of a child living in the house with an alcoholic, and waking up not knowing what was going to happen. And not knowing how my day was going to go, and all of it dependent on somebody else and whether he was not going to drink or drink.”
When Charlize was 15 years old, the horror came to a tragic head when her father returned home drunk and threatened both Charlize and her mom with a gun. In self-defense, Charlize’s mom shot him dead. In a 2004 interview with Diane Sawyer, Charlize recalled how her dad would disappear for weeks at a time, and on the night of his death in June 1991, he and her uncle came to her home after a night of drinking, with her aunt even calling to warn her and her mom that her dad was agitated.
Per court documents detailed in this interview, upon his arrival home, Charlize’s dad began shooting at the locked gate, then through the kitchen door before angrily banging on Charlize’s bedroom door. He purportedly told Charlize and her mom: “Tonight I’m going to kill you both with the shotgun.”
After firing the gun into Charlize’s room, her mom grabbed her own handgun and acted in self-defense, killing Charlize’s dad and wounding her uncle. “It happened,” Charlize emotionally told Diane. “I wish I could change it, I can’t. Nobody can change it, that’s what happened.”
Charlize also said that it was “tough” having this part of her life be public knowledge, as it was about her mom as well as herself. She said: “For years, I just said he died in a car accident, because it’s not about me. If it was just about me, I think I could talk about it, but my mother’s involved. She has never asked to be in the spotlight; she never asked for any of this.”
4. Right off the bat, it needs to be acknowledged that 92-year-old Roman Polanski is a hugely controversial figure. He remains a fugitive from the US to this day after he fled in 1978 when he faced a prison term for allegedly drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.
But he is on this list because his life has also been full of extraordinary tragedy — from surviving the Holocaust as a child to his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, being brutally murdered by followers of notorious cult leader Charles Manson.
Roman was born in Paris in 1933 but raised in Poland, and when he was six years old, his Jewish family was forced into the Kraków Ghetto under Nazi occupation. His mom was later deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed, while his father was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp and miraculously survived.
By the 1960s, Roman was widely considered one of Europe’s most promising young directors, and in 1967, he started dating actor Sharon Tate. They married the following year, but horror struck in the summer of 1969 when Sharon was eight and a half months pregnant with her and Roman’s son.
On August 9, members of Charles Manson’s cult broke into Sharon and Roman’s home and brutally murdered Sharon and four of her friends, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. They were each stabbed a dozen times, and their blood was used to write on the walls.
Roman was in London at the time, and his friend Andy Braunsberg was with him when he received the call that his pregnant wife had been murdered. In Sharon Tate: A Life, Andy said: “He literally unraveled in front of my eyes. He disintegrated."
In addition to his overwhelming grief, Roman also had to deal with being a suspect in the murders, with the director recalling that the press relentlessly speculated that he had been involved for "several months until the police finally found the real killers, Charles Manson and his 'family.'"
5. Demi Moore’s memoir, Inside Out, caused a huge stir in 2019 due to the amount of shocking and heartbreaking revelations that the actor shared about her life — including the time her “charming womanizer” grandfather was decapitated after drunkenly driving into a moving truck.
Demi had an incredibly difficult home life as a child, with both of her parents struggling with alcoholism. When she was 12 years old, Demi’s world came crashing down when she learned that the man she believed to be her biological father wasn’t, which deeply affected her sense of identity.
Then, when she was 15, the unthinkable happened when Demi’s mom seemingly arranged for a man to rape her daughter. During a 2019 interview on Good Morning America, Demi revealed that her attacker asked her at the time: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for $500?” adding: “In my deep heart, I don’t think it was a straightforward transaction, but she still did give him the access and put me in harm's way."
Demi’s glittering movie career first started to take off in 1984, when she was 20 years old, and at this point, the star began to experiment with drugs, triggering her own addiction battle. After reaching breaking point in the late ‘80s, Demi entered rehab, which proved to be a pivotal moment in both Demi’s career and personal life.
6. Jada Pinkett Smith is another star whose difficult life really came to light in her memoir, with Jada speaking candidly about what it was like to be born to a teen mom who struggled with heroin addiction and a largely absent father.
Jada’s rocky home life meant that she had to learn how to be independent and take care of herself at a very young age, which led to her dealing drugs as a teenager and finding herself in incredibly dangerous situations.
Jada ended up selling crack cocaine, and admitted that she thought she was going to “be a queenpin” after she got “caught up” in the lifestyle that led to her chasing people with switchblades and even having a gun held to her head.
“Or the Jada that would sell crack cocaine and then get set up, and two dudes come in with nine-millimeters and she gets a gun put to her head,” she went on. “That was my solution at that particular time to survive, and it really helped me. But it put me into a lot of danger, and I hurt a lot of people along the way."
7. Actor Barry Keoghan also had an incredibly difficult childhood as a result of his mom and dad’s heroin addiction, and while little is known about Barry’s dad, his mom ultimately died from an overdose when he was just 12 years old.
The star previously revealed that he and his younger brother, Eric, were taken into foster care when he was five years old, and they spent the next four years being moved around 13 different homes and seeing their mom on weekends.
But while he didn’t live with his mom, Barry was still hugely affected by her addiction battle, sharing: “I remember laying in bed and [my mom] screaming through the letterbox, just wanting money, and we had to lay in bed and my aunt and granny was like: ‘Just don't go down.’ That haunts me. That was one of the last times I heard her, like, her voice, and that stuff haunts me.”
8. Keanu Reeves was just three years old when his father abandoned his family, and his mom ended up moving them around the world — from Keanu's birth country of Lebanon to Australia to New York to Toronto, where they eventually settled — which left Keanu feeling rootless throughout his childhood.
Then, on the cusp of Keanu’s thriving career back in 1993, his best friend River Phoenix died of a drug overdose, which left the star devastated. Keanu had just started production on his movie Speed when River passed, and while he has rarely spoken publicly about his friend’s death, Keanu’s Speed co-star Sandra Bullock has reflected on how much it impacted him.
“I watched how Keanu grieved. And oh, did he grieve for his friend,” Sandra told Esquire in 2021. “He’s very private, but he couldn’t hide that. And just to see that a man like that was able to grieve. And I remember thinking, God, if that’s the tip of the iceberg of his depth, and his level of love and care for a friend — that just draws you in.”
Sadly, River was just the beginning of Keanu’s grief, with tragedy striking Keanu’s life again in 1999 when he and his girlfriend Jennifer Syme’s daughter, Ava Archer Syme-Reeves, was stillborn on Christmas Eve, when Jennifer was eight months pregnant.
This heartache resulted in the end of Keanu and Jennifer’s romantic relationship, but the two remained close friends. Then, less than two years after their loss, Jennifer was killed in a car crash at the age of 28.
Despite his fame, Keanu has always kept his personal life as private as possible, but he did reflect on his experience with grief in a 2006 interview with Parade, where he said: “Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say: ‘It's gone, and I'm better.' They're wrong."
"When the people you love are gone, you're alone," he added at the time. "I miss being a part of their life, and them being a part of mine. I wonder what the present would be like if they were here – what we might have done together. I miss all the great things that will never be."
9. In her 2020 memoir, Mariah Carey candidly opened up about her experience of growing up in poverty in an incredibly violent household, the racism that her family endured, and even alleged extremely concerning abuse from her sister, which her sister has vehemently denied.
"By the time I was a toddler, I had developed the instincts to sense when violence was coming," Mariah wrote in reference to her abusive father. “When violence is a way of life in your family, it’s not an event — it’s just your reality.” The star also detailed a time when she was six years old and had called a family friend to help her mom after she’d been assaulted. She recalled the police saying about her: "If this kid survives, it will be a miracle."
But the pain that Mariah endured was not just limited to inside her house, with the biracial singer also being subjected to vile racism after her family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Long Island. One particularly disturbing incident was when Mariah came home to find that their pet dog had been poisoned.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Mariah described a group of girls locking her in a bedroom and repeatedly shouting the n-word at her after she was invited over for a sleepover. "The venom and hate with which these girls spewed this... chant was so strong, it quite literally lifted me out of my body," she wrote. "I was disoriented and terrified, and I thought that maybe, if I held on and just kept crying, surely a grown-up would come and stop the assault. But no one came."
Mariah also made a string of disturbing allegations against her older sister, Alison Carey, from when she was 12 years old. Alison denied the claims and filed a defamation lawsuit over them — you can read more about it here.
10. Kelsey Grammer first shot to fame in 1984 for his role as Dr. Frasier Crane in the sitcom Cheers, which was so popular that it led to its own spin-off: Frasier. However, by this point in his life, he had already endured unimaginable pain and heartbreak.
But tragedy struck when Kelsey was just 13 years old, with his father being shot and killed outside of his home by a stranger. The killer ended up being found not guilty by reason of insanity, which left Kelsey feeling helpless.
Then, just seven years later, Kelsey’s family faced even more horror when his younger sister, Karen Grammar, was kidnapped by four men, raped, and murdered in Colorado Springs. Kelsey admitted that he blamed himself for Karen’s death, telling Vanity Fair: "It's hard to explain. It's not rational. But it happens anyway. I know a lot of people who've lost their siblings and blame themselves."
Freddie Glenn was convicted of Karen's murder as well as the murder of two other women the following year. He was sentenced to death, which was eventually overturned, and Kelsey has spoken out against his release ahead of multiple parole opportunities. He wrote to the parole board in 2009: “I miss her in my bones. I was her big brother. I was supposed to protect her — I could not… It very nearly destroyed me."
And in 2014, Kelsey addressed Karen’s killer directly via video link, where he told him: "I accept that you actually live with remorse every day of your life, but I live with tragedy every day of mine… I accept your apology. I forgive you. However, I cannot give your release my endorsement. To give that a blessing would be a betrayal of my sister's life."
Heartbreakingly, Kelsey’s father and sister’s murders weren’t the end of his family trauma, with his two half-brothers, Billy and Stephen, being killed in a scuba-diving accident in 1980. When Billy failed to resurface during a dive, Stephen went back down to look for him but died of an air embolism. Billy’s body was never found.
Kelsey later attributed his well-documented battle with substance abuse in the ‘90s to his grief, saying that he “just kept drinking” in a bid to “numb the pain,” and telling Vanity Fair in 2015: “That was the time when I could not forgive myself for my sister’s death.”
11. One Direction star Louis Tomlinson has also endured far more than his fair share of grief and heartache, with the star losing both his mom and his younger sister a little over two years apart.
Then, in May 2016, 24-year-old Louis received a phone call from his mom while at his friend Jamie Vardy’s wedding, with Johannah telling him that she had been diagnosed with leukemia. “What I found really challenging during even that first conversation with her about it was I still wanted to inspire hope,” he remembered. “I didn’t want her to feel like she’d upset me, even though, obviously, it wasn’t her choice.”
Johannah passed away in December of that same year, leaving behind Louis and his six younger siblings. Louis admitted that he carried “resentment for the world” about six months after his mom’s death, where he felt like he “could only lose.” Ultimately, he ended up coping with his grief by focusing on being a pillar of strength for his younger siblings, which gave him a sense of “purpose.”
But in March 2019, tragedy struck for a second time when Louis’s 18-year-old sister Félicité died following an accidental overdose, which led to overwhelming feelings of guilt as he felt like he’d failed to be his family’s protector and let down his mom, who had made him promise that he’d take care of his siblings.
“Even though I knew that it wasn’t fair on myself, I felt utterly guilty. I felt powerless, and I felt like I’d let my sister down and like I’d let my mom down,” Louis said. “My mom said to me in the last couple of weeks of her life, she was like: ‘You better promise me you look after your sisters,’ and I’m like: ‘Yeah, you know, of course, you know I will,’ and she was like: ‘But specifically Félicité, she’s fragile.’”
Louis’s sister Lottie Tomlinson previously wrote in her book, Lucky Girl, that she and Louis desperately tried to help Félicité in the months before her death, which included arranging for her to see therapists and sending her to rehab in addition to trying to be there as much as possible for her as a support system.
And then, in October 2024, one of Louis’s closest friends and former bandmate Liam Payne died after falling from a hotel balcony in Argentina. The star recalled finding out after receiving a text from his other ex-bandmate, Niall Horan, after dropping his son, Freddie, off at school in Los Angeles.
Louis then admitted that despite his past losses, he was still deeply impacted by Liam’s death, sharing: “I naively thought that, at this point, I’d unfortunately be a little bit more well-versed with grief than other people my age. I thought that might mean something, but it didn’t at all.”
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453(4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.