Brad Pitt is showing a new spirit as a teetotaller
I’m as unsympathetic as the next civilian to the woebegone plight of gilded celebrities for whom wealth, fame and glamour just aren’t enough.
But something about Brad Pitt’s booze confession touched a chord. There he was, handsome and hugely successful as an actor and a producer, married to the actress turned humanitarian Angelina Jolie and with six healthy children. And yet, as he eloquently put it in this month’s GQ Style, he could not and would not stop drinking. He drank often and he drank hard, so hard that he destroyed his marriage and ripped his family apart.
Pitt, 53, is now teetotal, in therapy and loving it. He’s taken up sculpture, working through his divorce and striving to be a better father. How redemptive for him – and how infuriating and hurtful for his wife, who struggled to connect with him for a very long time before she filed for divorce last September.
Instead, with all the evangelism of a convert, the Oscar winner is espousing the health benefits of cranberry juice and fizzy water. He is far from alone.
The old adage that one drink is fine, two is too many and three is not enough has led almost half the population in Britain to shun alcohol. Official figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed that 56.9 per cent of those aged 15 and over had drunk alcohol in the week before being interviewed, a fall from 64.2 per cent in 2005. As 21 per cent of adults describe themselves as teetotal, it’s clear that there’s a seismic shift in attitudes, particularly among the young. Meanwhile, hospital admissions due to liver disease have risen 57 per cent over the last decade, as older people pay the price for hard living.
Cutting out rather than cutting down seems to be the new mantra.