Actor Richard Dreyfuss has referred to himself as “a secular, agnostic Jew.” But his real life is even more colorful than the picture his own description paints. He’s been married three times. He’s won an Academy Award for Best Actor and was nominated for another. And he’s probably best known for his roles in the movies counted among the most important in American film history: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and American Graffiti to name just a few. Yet Dreyfuss’s roles off-screen are more complex than any of the characters he’s played.
The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive
Dreyfuss is never hesitant to speak out about his feelings on subjects like religion, politics and civic duty. And in 2006, Dreyfus publicly announced that he lives with bipolar disorder and talked about the bipolar symptoms he struggles with in the groundbreaking documentary by Stephen Frye, The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. The two-part piece investigates the reality of living with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression. “I have a disease of the brain and I share it with others,” Frye explains on film. Dreyfuss is among them.
As Frye points out in his documentary, Dreyfuss’s bipolar disorder has led him into all kinds of strange situations. And some of his most unpredictable behavior emerged on the heels of his blockbuster hits. Esquire wrote that he was “out of control.” He earned a reputation for being brash, outspoken and eccentric. Movie historian David Thomson wrote that, by the late '70s, the disaster that followed his success came because of “vanity, drug involvement, over-assertiveness, fickle public taste and maybe the fact that Dreyfuss is happier as a character actor than as a star.”
Though he’s spent most of his life battling his bipolar symptoms and the situations they contributed to, Dreyfuss also eased the pain of his mood swings with street drugs and alcohol. “I’ve recognized that, in certain times, my behavior has been capable of being off-putting perhaps,” Dreyfuss says in the movie. “I scream, I make faces…I get drunk and unruly and loud and I got into a car one night and I flipped a car. It was public, everyone knew about it…” That’s when Dreyfuss asked his doctor to test him, saying he knew something was wrong.
Bipolar Disorder Treatment
Dreyfuss also opens up about what Frye calls his “pharmaceutical regime”—the medication he takes for bipolar treatment and to deal with symptoms related to manic depression, attention deficit disorder, concentration, sleep and anxiety. “With Lithium, I remember driving down Mullholland Drive one night and all of a sudden I was aware, after 10 days of taking Lithium, that I had letterboxed…that I could feel it. It was an absolutely non-claustrophobic experience that said ‘you can live here.’ And I was absolutely happy to do it,” Dreyfuss says. “I married with it. I had children with it. I reclaimed a career if you want to put it that way.”
Lithium was the first thing Dreyfuss took and once he was on it, he had to stay on it for decades. “I changed, dramatically. I said to my doctor once, ‘I have become a person I admire in the last few years. I have wept more, I have said ‘I’m sorry’ more, I have succeeded in endeavors that were impossible…and I could not have done that without this courage. And he said to me ‘It’s not courage, it’s the absence of anxiety.’ And that is as true a statement.”
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