Why MacDowell doesn’t drink

Andie MacDowell is a teetotaler for a reason, said Martha Hayes in TheGuardian.com. Her single mother was an alcoholic—and growing up in the small town of Gaffney, S.C., it fell to MacDowell, the youngest of four siblings, to keep an eye on her. From the age of 10, she’d get up late at night to check that her mother had stubbed her cigarettes out properly. “There were burn marks all over the floor and on the couch,” says the actress. “It’s amazing we didn’t burn down.” At 16, she was working alongside her mom at McDonald’s and watched her get fired for turning up drunk. At 17, she tried to get medical help for her mother’s alcoholism—the doctor prescribed Valium, creating more problems. “We could have committed her,” MacDowell says. “We just didn’t have the guts.” Five years later, her mother—then 53— died of a heart attack. By then, MacDowell had moved to Paris to work as a model. She still clings to one of the last letters her mother sent her. “She said she had quit drinking and that she was so proud of me,” says MacDowell, 61. “That was the last year of her life, and I didn’t really get to be around it, which was super sad. I think about going back to Gaffney. I’d like to go back and try to find out from other people what that year was like.”