It’s never an easy choice to cut off contact with someone in your family. But as celebrities like Meghan Markle, Matthew McConaughey,Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Aniston can all attest, sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s a choice at all. You can say “family first” all you want, but when someone in your life hurts you over and over and shows no sign they’re interested in changing, it becomes a matter of self-preservation.
Over the years, a surprising number of stars have made the brave choice not only to set those boundaries but to share their stories with the world. For many, it was the matter of celebrity itself that became a sticking point with family members, or dramatically changed how their loved ones were behaving. But for others, a close relationship with their parents was never on the table, and their talents in the arts were a welcome escape from home.
Perhaps the most well-publicized case of estrangement in recent years has been that of Meghan Markle and her father Thomas, in large part because of Thomas’ undying interest in rehashing the matter with the media. Their troubles began with Thomas staging paparazzi photos in his hometown in the weeks leading up to Meghan’s royal wedding, cashing in on her newfound fame, and ignoring her pleas to stop.
In another heartbreaking story, Matthew McConaughey opened up about a similar experience of finding his mother intoxicated with his success and willing to speak to the press about him in his memoir Greenlights. In the memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, meanwhile, the singer describes a childhood where she was drugged, attacked, and put into danger by her older sister, years before her career would begin.
For all the differences in their stories, all these accounts of family estrangement share the same pain: the realization that they couldn’t trust someone they’d loved so much.
For anyone who’s ever struggled with the decision to cut off family contact or dealt with feelings of shame that follow — especially around the holidays — these stars’ stories are proof that you’re not alone. Read on to see which other stars have opened up about being estranged from family.
A version of this story was originally published in Nov. 2020.
Keanu Reeves
When Keanu Reeves was just three years old, his father, Samuel Nowlin Reeves Jr., left his family. And, after rare moments over the years, Samuel left his and his siblings’ lives by the time he turned 13.
“I think it’s definitely traumatizing,” the John Wick star once told The Guardian about never having a relationship with his dad. “But it’s hard to know how [it affected me] because I don’t know what the other life would have been, you know what I mean?”
He also explained that Samuel did reach out to him once, but to no avail. “Yeah, in the mid-90s, but I didn’t reach back out,” he said. When asked why, Keanu didn’t have a good explanation. “I just didn’t,” he said.
Samuel died in 2018 at the age of 76.
Kristin Cavallari
Kristin Cavallari is the latest celebrity to open up about her strained relationships with her family. In an episode of her Let’s Be Honest podcast in 2023, Cavallari revealed she hadn’t spoken to her dad, Dennis, in “about two years,” per Daily Mail.
“[It’s] has honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said.
And while Cavallari didn’t get into all the details about what happened to them, she said she realized he was a narcissist after a falling out.
“How I got my dad out of my life was something happened with my kids and it crossed the line,” she remembered. “And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m f— done.”
In their disagreement, things got heated between them. “I was always like, ‘I can take it … I can take the abuse.’ I have my whole life. But it’s like when you start now messing with my kids, I’m not doing it.”
“I actually didn’t even realize that my dad was a narcissist until I was an adult,” she added.
Macaulay Culkin
As one of the biggest child stars in the world, Macaulay Culkin and his family were rocky from the very beginning. According to one interview of Culkin on WTF With Marc Maron in 2018, his father, Christopher Cornelius “Kit” Culkin, was abusive, both mentally and physically, since the beginning of his stardom.
“[He said] ‘Do good or I’ll hit you,'” Culkin remembered, per People. “He was a bad man. He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to.”
Culkin then explained that a lot of the tension was jealousy from Kit, who was also an actor. “Everything he tried to do in life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old,” Culkin said.
When he was 14, Culkin told his parents Richie Rich would be his final movie, per Vanity Fair. Unsurprisingly, not only did his dad not take it well, but he eventually sued his dad to get access to his earnings. “I learned how to read court papers at 14,” Culkin told the outlet.
Ariel Winter
While we all know Ariel Winter from Modern Family, her real-life family was far from being as endearing and supportive as the Dunphys. When she was just 14 years old, Winter left her mother’s care and her older sister, Shanelle Workman, became her legal guardian. By 17, she was fully emancipated.
According to multiple sources, Winter’s relationship with her mom, Chrisoula Workman, had become mentally and physically abusive.
“It has been very sad for me, but at the same time it’s been much better for me emotionally and physically to be on my own and have a better, safer household and support system,” the actress said in The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2016, per Seventeen.
Brie Larson
Brie Larson also had a rocky relationship with her father. According to Larson, her father, Sylvain Desaulniers, didn’t make any effort to be present in her life after her parents’ divorce when she was just seven years old.
“When legally I didn’t have to have visitation with him anymore, I jumped on it,” she told Elle about not communicating with her father. “As a kid, I tried to understand him and understand the situation. But he didn’t do himself any favors. I don’t think he ever really wanted to be a parent.”
Kelly Rowland
For most of her life, Kelly Rowland and her father, Christopher Lovett, never even spoke to each other. In 2018, however, the Destiny’s Child alum took a leap of faith and they finally met.
“This was the day I met Christopher Lovett, my biological father,” Rowland captioned on Instagram with a carousel of pictures of them. “This was honestly one of the most pivotal moments in my life! After 30 years of not seeing him, not speaking to him…what would THAT mean, for me, my family, my psyche?”
She continued, “Well, this day in Oct. of 2018, I would find out. I finally found him, set up the meeting, and at this time I was filming American Soul, when I tell you I was petrified, I was walking to meet him, and my feet suddenly felt like they weighed A TON, needles to say I was overcome with anxiety, and I had a full on anxiety attack, in that moment I felt like the abandoned 8yr old.”
“And as I turn the corner, in my head I was cursing this man, ‘Why didn’t you come find me?’ ‘Did you love me?’ ‘Am I worthy?’ And when I looked at him, and he looked at me, NOTHING CAME TO MY LIPS, not one word,” she recalled. “I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, listen. I listened to him, I was nervous to trust him, nervous to forgive him, nervous to love him nervous about it all. And the truth is, I already loved him. And since this time, I have forgiven, and we have spoken everyday since!”
The singer concluded the post, “I Love you Daddy, and love being your little girl…even at 39! Lol P.S. we are making up for lost time, and when I tell you, him telling me how smart and beautiful I am….will never get old! #HAPPYFATHERSDAY #reunited” What a wholesome ending!
Leighton Meester
Leighton Meester’s relationship with her parents has always been complicated, ever since she was born. “My family has a crazy history,” the Gossip Girl alum told Us Weekly. For some much-needed background, Meester was born in a prison while her mother, Constance, was serving federal prison time for drug trafficking. Her father, Doug, was also serving time for drug-related offenses. After the few months her mom took care of her in a halfway house, the actress was then taken to her grandparents who eventually raised her.
Over the years, both Leighton and her mother have been vocal about their animosity, both in the media and in court. In 2010, for example, Constance sued Leighton for assault claiming the actress hit her with a bottle, Hollywood Life reported. In 2011, Constance dropped the charges.
“I look back now and I see it in a nice light,” the actress said of her childhood. “It wasn’t uncomplicated. But I played outside. I went to the beach. There were happy, fun times.”
Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston patched things up with her mother Nancy Dow before she passed away in 2016, but their relationship was famously complicated, publicly so in 1999 tell-all book from Dow From Mother And Daughter To Friends: A Memoir.
“She was critical. She was very critical of me,” Aniston told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn’t. I never was. I honestly still don’t think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine. She was also very unforgiving. She would hold grudges that I just found so petty.”
“She had a temper. I can’t tolerate that. If I get upset, I will discuss [things]. I will never scream and get hysterical like that,” she added. “[But] I was never taught that I could scream. One time, I raised my voice to my mother, and I screamed at her, and she looked at me and burst out laughing. She was laughing at me [for] screaming back. And it was like a punch in my stomach.”
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey’s relationship with mom Mary turned sour when he first started making it big as an actor, and his mom seemed to be getting more enjoyment out of the publicity than he was.
“Mother wasn’t answering the phone. A fan of my fame was answering the phone,” McConaughey said on Red Table Talk. “I was trying to find my own balance with fame and stuff. And I would share things with her… some of those things I would share might show up in the six o’clock news three days later.”
The final straw — and what led him to cut her out of his life for eight years — was Mary letting reporters in to look at his childhood home for a TV special.
Meghan Markle
Meghan Markle and her father Thomas were, by all accounts, close in her childhood, when she lived with him during the week from age 11 on (he’d split from her mom Doria Ragland when she was just a few years old). When she got engaged to Prince Harry, he and her father had spoken on the phone, and Thomas planned to come to London for the ceremony. Before he got on the plane, however, he started staging paparazzi photos of himself to sell to tabloids and sharing personal information about Meghan, even selling the handwritten letter she wrote him begging him to stop speaking to the press.
Due to heart troubles, Thomas missed her wedding — and he’s spoken sorely about Meghan in the press ever since, decrying her “cruel” choice to cut him out of her life and commenting on everything from Megxit to the role Archie should play in the royal family.
Demi Lovato
On her 2015 album Confident, Demi Lovato penned a track called “Father” in which she opens up about her conflicted feelings toward estranged father Patrick, who passed away of cancer in 2013.
“I was very conflicted when he passed, because he was abusive,” Lovato said in an accompanying YouTube video at the time. “He was mean, but he wanted to be a good person. And he wanted to have his family, and when my mom married my stepdad, he still had this huge heart where he said, ‘I’m so glad that [he’s] taking care of you and doing the job that I wish I could do.'”
Eminem
Eminem grew up not having a relationship with his father Marshall Bruce Mathers, Jr., a topic he addressed in a number of his songs including “Cleanin’ Out My Closet.”
In the early 2000s, Marshall tried to reach out to his son via an open letter published in The Daily Mirror denying Eminem’s claims that he’d abandoned him and his mother when he was young and claiming instead that the rapper had been “fed lies” by his mother all his life.
Eminem didn’t respond to the letter, telling Anderson Cooper in 2010 on 60 Minutes that he wasn’t particularly impressed by his dad’s claim that it was too difficult to find his son once his mother moved him away “like a bolt from the blue.”
“If my kids moved to the edge of the Earth I would find them, no doubt in my mind,” he told Cooper. “No money, no nothing, if I had nothing I would find my kids.”
Drew Barrymore
Drew Barrymore started her acting career at 11 months old — or, more accurately, her actor parents started it for her, trying her out for commercials and taking it from there. By age 7, Barrymore struggled with alcoholism and went regularly partying with her mother; by age 10, drug addiction and depression. She was institutionalized by her mother for a year and a half at a facility she describes as a “boot camp.”
At just 14 years old, she legally emancipated herself from her parents.
In 2014, she told Marie Clairethat she was “empathetic” toward her mother, but they were not in each other’s lives.
“I’ve always been empathetic toward my mom, and I was even more so when I had a kid and we had a really amazing conversation about it. However, it hasn’t enabled me to lessen the distance. It’s the hardest subject in my life. I’ve never just been angry with her. I’ve always felt guilt and empathy and utter sensitivity. But we can’t really be in each other’s lives at this point.”
“I knew I would not repeat the mistakes of my parents,” she said later about having kids of her own. “I knew I would never do that to a kid. I wouldn’t not be there, or put them in too-adult circumstances.”
Griffin O’Neal
While Tatum O’Neal and father Ryan O’Neal’s addiction issues and estrangement were chronicled on the reality series Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals, less is known about Ryan’s long estrangement with son Griffin.
Unlike Tatum, who got together with her dad for a family reunion in 2020 after years of estrangement, Griffin has never repaired his relationship with his father, citing years of aggression, pressure to use drugs and neglect.
“I was the family joint roller. My life has been a reign of drug and alcohol degradation. I had to self-medicate my entire life because there was pain everywhere. There were drugs everywhere in my family all day, every day,” he told People in 2015. “The last time I saw my dad, he shot at me because I was trying to help his son [Redmond] get sober so I haven’t talked to him in nine years.”
Rihanna
In 2011, Rihanna opened up to Vogue about her longtime estrangement from her dad Ronald Fenty.
“Like, what do I even mean to him?” she told the magazine. “It’s really strange. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it, because you grow up with your father, you know him, you are a part of him, for goodness sake! And then he does something so bizarre that I can’t begin to wrap my mind around it. You hear horror stories about people going behind people’s backs and doing strange things, but you always think, Not my family. My father would never do that to me.”
Previously, Rihanna had spoken out about her father’s struggle with drug addiction and his physical abuse of her mother. She also revealed his betrayal when he lied to the press about having spoken with her following Chris Brown’s attack. “My dad went to the press and just told them a bunch of lies. Because he hadn’t talked to me after… that whole thing… He never called to find out how I was doing, if I was alive, nothing. He just never called. He went straight to the press and got a check. And now he does it again.”
As of 2019, Rihanna pursued legal action against her father for using his last name (Fenty) in branding to falsely claim affiliation with her.
Adele
Adele grew up largely without father Mark Evans in her life, visiting him occasionally but not feeling she had a relationship with him. “I’d cut off contact with him when I was ten or 11,” she told MusicLifeat one point. “I’m sure I will see him again. I think we can be friends. I don’t need him to be a dad now.”
But Evans’ later interview with The Sun revealing his years of alcoholism and sharing never-before-seen photos of Adele as a child changed everything. While accepting a Grammy in 2017 for “Hello,” she told her manager Jonathan Dickins: “I owe you everything. We’ve been together for ten years, and I love you like you’re my dad. I don’t love my dad, that’s the thing, so it doesn’t mean a lot, but I love you like I would love my dad!”
Bethenny Frankel
Bethenny Frankel grew up with mother Bernadette and stepfather John Parisella, who suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction and would routinely beat Bernadette to the point that Bethenny would have to call the police and intervene. Bethenny’s mother Bernadette has publicly denounced her while affirming her description of her childhood, defending Parisella as financially supportive and calling the RHONY star a “moron” and “liar.”
While Bethenny welcoming her own daughter Bryn briefly prompted her to reach back out to mom Bernadette, their reunions have never lasted long.
Christina Aguilera
Christina Aguilera has opened up about her father physically and and emotionally abusing her as a child, saying she felt “powerless” growing up and turning to music as an outlet. As an adult, she’s tried sparingly to get back in contact, with mixed results.
“I let him back into my life briefly but I soon realized that he is not necessary in my life,” she told Latina magazine. “I’ve talked about how rough things were for me and I’m sure he’s heard it. He can’t be thrilled about it. So maybe one day we can do lunch… I’m 31 years old now. Maybe it’s time.”
Kate Hudson
If you ask Kate Hudson (or her brother Oliver), they’ll tell you they were raised by her mom Goldie Hawn and her longtime partner Kurt Russell. Biological father Bill Hudson separated from their mother a year after Kate was born and was only intermittently in their lives after that, while Russell became a stable and dependable father figure.
In 2015, Bill went on a rampage against Oliver and Kate, telling DailyMail: “I say to them now, ‘I set you free.’ I had five birth children and I now consider myself a father of three. I no longer recognize Oliver and Kate as my own… [Oliver] is dead to me now. As is Kate.”
As for Kate, she told Howard Stern in 2016 that she’s just working on forgiveness.
“I think forgiveness in any aspect is something that is complex. It is the greatest tool to be able to separate that attachment. So for me, I recognize whatever those issues are is something he has to live with. That must be painful for him and I forgive him.”
Mariah Carey
In new memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, Carey opened up about estranged older sister Alison, who she says fed her drugs and violently attacked her as a child, once burning her with boiling water over a phone call.
“She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking down at her mug of still-steaming tea in her hand, and when she lifted her face, her eyes were rabid, without a trace of playfulness,” Carey writes. “The next thing I remember I was stripped down to my waist, and a doctor was removing the remaining bits of my white-and-turquoise diagonal-striped top, which was embedded into the flesh of my shoulder, with large tweezers. My back was splattered with third-degree burns. I couldn’t recognize it as mine, as it turned different shades of maroon from the violent scalding I received at the hands of my sister. The horrific physical sensation had been so intense that I blacked out.”
Dylan Farrow
Dylan Farrow first told her mother Mia Farrow about her adoptive father Woody Allen molesting her at age 7, after which Mia took her to a doctor and encouraged her to share what had happened. In 2018, Dylan spoke to Gayle King about her allegations and why Allen has felt so comfortable publicly denying them for years.
“He’s lying and he’s been lying for so long. And it is difficult for me to see him and to hear his voice,” she confessed.
Allen has accused Mia of “coaching” Dylan to make up predatory behavior from Allen as revenge for his affair with Mia’s other adoptive child, Soon-Yi. A Connecticut state prosecutor involved in the initial investigation said that, despite probable cause to charge Allen, they did not move forward to trial to spare Dylan the trauma.
“How is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?” she wondered to King. “I do wish that they had [gone on with the trial] even if I’m just speaking in retrospect. I was already traumatized.” Safe say Dylan and Allen aren’t on speaking terms.
Heather Graham
Heather Graham and her once-close parents have been estranged ever since the 1997 release of Boogie Nights, a Paul Thomas Anderson drama about the porn industry that her Catholic parents reportedly found too against their values to stomach. Curiously, her parents have made statements to publications like The Sun in the past decade claiming that they had no objection to the film, and that they themselves don’t know why Heather is no longer in their lives. But Graham herself has kept a tight lid on anything to do with her family.
Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins hasn’t spoken to the daughter he shares with ex-wife Petronella Barker, Abigail Hopkins, in over 20 years, but the actor isn’t losing sleep over it.
“You know, I did the best I could, but you know, okay, I think if somebody doesn’t want to be part of my life, fine. Go and do whatever you want,” he told The Telegraph in 2018. “I wish her well and all that, but I don’t want to talk about my daughter. Those things are over.”
Abigail has described their relationship throughout her childhood as “intermittent” (he left her mother when she was a toddler), and shared that their lacking relationship contributed to her struggles with substance abuse and depression.
In 2002, Hopkins opened up about feeling his daughter pulling away from him in an interview with Howard Stern. “I hardly ever hear from her. She probably has good reasons. I guess we are estranged. I hope she is well. She is too busy and has to do her own thing. I think she is in England somewhere. Life is life. You get on with it.”
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