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Time continues to prove that no idol is not without faults. Denzel Washington has revealed he battled alcohol abuse for a large part of his career.
The esteemed actor was recently profiled on Esquire Magazine. The feature chronicles his life as a youth in Mount Vernon, NY all the way up to his beginnings as a budding actor. This piece does a magnificent job of allowing Denzel Washington to tell his story in his own words. When discussing his very controversial loss to Kevin Spacey at the 2000 Academy Awards for the Best Actor Award (Denzel was nominated for Hurricane) he says he went home and drank. Denzel admits that the loss made him bitter and this was his way of hosting his own pity party.
He went on to detail how his love for wine eventually became a very bad habit. “Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden. And part of it was we built this big house in 1999 with a ten-thousand-bottle wine cellar, and I learned to drink the best” he explained. When the cellar eventually thinned out he would call a local shop to have a pair of bottles personally delivered to his home. When asked by his wife why he would only buy two at a time he revealed this was his way of limiting himself. “Because if I order more, I’ll drink more. So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”
Even though he was drinking heavily he says he never let it interfere with his profession. “I never drank while I was working or preparing. I would clean up, go back to work—I could do both” he explained. “However many months of shooting, bang, it’s time to go. Then, boom.Three months of wine, then time to go back to work.” Thankfully Denzel Washington saw the error of his ways back then and dropped the habit. He has since been clean and will make his ten year anniversary of sobriety in December.
You can read Denzel Washington’s story on Esquire Magazine here.
