A tribute to fragile beauty, otherworldly voices, the lost art of intelligence, and big, burly women.

Nancy Juvonen, business partner in Barrymore’s production company, Flower Films:

Every time Drew has a party, she sets up paints for her guests. Sometimes it’s little canvases, and sometimes it’s plates or mugs. She gave me my thirty-first-birthday party three years ago, and Matt Groening painted me an original Homer.

Amy Heckerling, director, producer (Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High):

Once at Drew’s house I was painting pictures next to David Schwimmer, and oddly enough I painted a picture of Steve Buscemi. I can’t explain it — it just came out Steve Buscemi. I think Marilyn Manson was upset because he doesn’t think people should paint unless they’re famous artists. I don’t know. He was like, “I can’t watch this.”

Justine Baddeley, casting director, and Melissa Bochco, daughter of producer Steven Bochco, both longtime friends of Barrymore’s:

JB: I’m a casting director; we did Charlie’s Angels, Never Been Kissed, Being John Malkovich.

MB: I don’t do anything. I watch a lot of television. If it makes you feel better, I’m not, like, on welfare or anything — I’m totally rich.

Nancy Juvonen, budding mogul:

One thing that her friends will all attest to is Drew is the best spot remover. She can get a spot out of any fabric, anywhere. We don’t know what she uses — I think lemon is one of her secrets — but she will find whatever she needs in your kitchen and get a spot out of anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s cranberry juice — she will get it out.

Amy Heckerling:

When Drew and I met, we were the sole members of the world’s smallest support group — women who had enough power to get a movie made for their boyfriends, who then wouldn’t even go to the premieres with us [Barrymore's Home Fries, Heckerling's A Night at the Roxbury].

Cameron Diaz, actor, occasional purveyor of the endearment “dude”:

One day she called me up and said, “Okay, I have this idea.” She got me in my car. I was driving around, and she said, “Lookit, this is what I’m doing: I’m doing Charlie’s Angels, and I really want you to be a part of it. We want to make it, like, fun and full of action and just girls being, like, hot and tough and funny and beautiful and sexy and fast and, you know, capable and not using any weapons…” just like going on and on in her Drew way; I felt like I just was on a roller-coaster ride with her. We were on the phone for like an hour. And at the end of it, I was like, “Okay, my battery’s gonna die. We’re gonna do this!”

Later I get a phone call from my manager, saying, “Did you tell Drew you were gonna do Charlie’s Angels?” And I was like, “Yeah!” And they were a little bit like, “But there’s no script!”

Roger Ebert, semiotician, critic, Ebert & Roeper at the Movies:

Drew Barrymore speaks in long, long paragraphs, punctuated only with commas, semicolons, and the words like and and. Being in the room with her is like inhaling a shot in one of those oxygen bars.

Justine Baddeley and Melissa Bochco, who, you should know, were bridesmaids in Barrymore’s nuptials:

JB: Here’s a huge thing with Drew — she is not scared of anything. You guys went to Morocco together, right, Mel?

MB: No, we went to Greece and Egypt and Israel. And Turkey.

JB: We went to Mexico a few years ago. I was absolutely petrified of the barracuda fish, but Drew will literally, if there is any body of water, she will just dive right in. I think there’s some affinity she has with marine life, because I saw somebody get bit by a barracuda fish —

MB: You did?

JB: Yes, I did! I saw a lady who had a big barracuda bite on her body. But not Drew!

Joseph McGinty Nichol, aka “McG,” director, Charlie’s Angels:

When we did a shot of Drew’s character, Dylan, rolling down the hill naked, she wanted to do it herself. Naked. And she just disrobed in front of the whole crew and said, “Let’s make it happen.” At that point, I knew I really loved her. Her comfort with her natural role in the order of the universe is very inspired.

James L. Brooks, writer, producer, director; the brains behind As Good as It Gets, The Simpsons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show — yes, you’ll take his call:

Drew came to my house for dinner one night, and I’m somebody who misses New York because I miss the seasons. And, somehow, she brought a season with her. She was wearing a coat, and she came in — my theory is that there are some places that sell things only to certain people; we would never have been able to buy flowers like these — she came in with these flowers that were so special and bountiful, and in the middle of the bouquet was her face. She comes in with such a spirit of goodwill; it’s just goodwill pie. It’s just exponential how much goodwill she can put out.

There’s a line in The Philadelphia Story about Tracy being incandescent, lit from within, and it’s almost literal with Drew.

George Plimpton, editor, The Paris Review:

I remember the night Drew Barrymore danced on the bar at Coyote, or the Limelight, or perhaps it was Hogs & Heifers. I was there with the English novelist Tibor Fischer, though it may have been another one. At any rate, this girl got up from the table at the far end of the room and began gyrating on the bar, and there was quite a lot of shouting. I said, “Look, Tibor, it’s Drew Barrymore dancing on the bar.” So Tibor looked, and he said, “No, it’s not, it’s Ann something-or-other. She’s always doing that sort of thing.” I said, “How would you know? You’re English. If there’s a girl dancing on a bar, it’s got to be Drew Barrymore.” He said, “You’re off your nut! It’s Ann something-or-other!” So we got into rather a shouting match about this, and finally Tibor reached across the table and removed my glasses so he could hit me in the eye without breaking them. Very English, that. Fortunately, I lowered my head at the last and he cracked his knuckles against the toughest part of my cranium. He shook his hand to fend off the pain. He said, “Holy macaroon!” which is very like him to say. At any rate, that’s the night I saw Drew Barrymore dancing on the bar.

Wes Craven, director:

When I was asked to direct Scream, Drew was already committed to starring in it, and the first thing she did shortly after I was hired was decide not to be the star. I was crushed. I called her up, and she said, “I think I can take this picture and kick it off in a way that you’ll be happy with — and think of how astonishing it will be if my character dies after fifteen minutes. The audience will be totally flummoxed.” And she was absolutely right. She came in and did five incredibly intense days and gave us absolutely everything she had and just kicked that picture off into the stratosphere in the first fifteen minutes in a way nobody’s been able to forget.

Lucy Liu, actor, on her audition for Charlie’s Angels:

When I left, my agent called me, and I said, “I don’t even care if I got the job or not. It was such an incredible experience meeting those girls that I don’t feel like I’m alone in the world.”

Joseph McGinty Nichol, who actually, really refers to himself as “Mick-gee”:

I knew she was the coolest person in the world when she showed me a photo of the heavy-metal group Ratt jamming at her eighth-birthday party.

Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures:

She said, “I’m doing it with McG,” and she brought him in. She’s a very determined girl. She was very clear from the beginning, I must say, about the movie that she believed we should be making. And she knew that we needed to cast it with other stars besides herself. I don’t know that every actor in the world would say, “I’m gonna go get a Cameron Diaz.” She was a real mix of artist and businessperson in the package of a very young girl. Quite astonishing.

Joseph McGinty Nichol: In the meeting, [Amy Pascal's] arms were crossed, her legs were crossed, and her head was moving left to right in a slow, steady fashion. And, you know, I just sort of kept going for it, and I was sort of tap-dancing around the table and jumping up on chairs and acting out scenes and going for it, and Amy was sort of stone-faced, but Drew kept nodding and smiling and giving me the kind of “go on, go on” sign, and that just gave me the confidence I needed.

Cameron Diaz: When we started out with Charlie’s Angels, Drew and I were going through this intensely rigorous training. We were literally morphing physically; at the end of the day, you could see your body changing. And our [martial-arts] master said to us, “You’re going to meet your new best friend, and his name is pain.” Well, Drew said she wanted to learn to speak Chinese. So they started to teach her Cantonese; she started off with, “How do you say ‘pain’?” [Answer: something like "tong."] And she started asking, “How do you say, ‘I have pain in my legs?’ How do you say, ‘I have pain in my butt?’ ”

And every morning Drew would string together every word that she had learned from them into one big long sentence, and she would do these little dances, so she’s like, “Say see tong tong tong! There’s fire in my legs! I have pain in my ass!”

Nancy Juvonen, who, FYI, is “cell phone only”:

One thing that is really interesting about Drew is that the public knows everything about her.

Powerful Hollywood Executive, reacting to the previous statement:

She’s an actress. She knows how much to give so that you feel that way. No, you can’t use that.

Nancy Juvonen:

Her real dream is to have a farm and kids and animals.

Justine Baddeley and Melissa Bochco:

JB: In Mexico, we went to this spider-monkey sanctuary in the middle of nowhere. We were on the Yucatán Peninsula. And they can be a little bit naughty and go for you, biting. Drew just jumped in, and the monkey was just, like, on top of her head. There’s just no fear factor.

MB: I have pictures of, like, pigeons sitting on her head and stuff.

JB: I have a big bee’s nest outside my house, and it took me so long to find a beekeeper, because [your garden-variety pest-control professionals] are all like, “Sure, we’ll come over and exterminate them!” But I’m like, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m trying to find somebody that won’t kill them.”

MB: Well, that’s not going to happen.

JB: No, somebody’s coming! I found a beekeeper! He’s a proper beekeeper. I’m not just having somebody come and kill the whole nest. You know?

Adam Sandler, via his personal assistant, via Drew Barrymore’s publicist:

I’m going to have to pass on this one. And don’t call this number again.

Lucy Liu, healthy eater:

I grew up eating everything, and Drew will try anything, too. I mean, she’s a vegetarian, but she eats fish now. But if she went to some place that specializes in buffalo burgers, she wouldn’t not take a bite of it. She’s always very, very open to things.

Barry Rice, journalism professor, Columbia College Chicago, former editor,Chicago Sun-Times online:

The 1999 Drew Barrymore movie Never Been Kissed depicted copy editors at the Chicago Sun-Times as having capacious private offices and helpful personal secretaries. This is incorrect. Copy editors at the Chicago Sun-Times have neither offices nor helpful secretaries. Hell, if memory serves, they have to bring their own pencils. Thank you for the opportunity to clear this up.

Jackie Harvey, Hollywood columnist, The Onion:

Item! I remember sitting in the theater watching a little movie, perhaps you remember it… Cat’s Eye? Well, in case you don’t, I’ll tell you. It was a very good movie filled with thrills and scares left and right. But the real thrill was a young scene-stealing actress named Drew Barrymore. Drew Barrymore! That name makes birds sing in my ears. I thought to myself, I have to watch out for this one! And, you know, I was right.

Wes Craven, an improbable oasis of sanity:

The striking thing about Drew is that she’s come through such difficulty, was such a huge child star, comes from this very high-powered family, has all the ingredients for sort of crashing and burning, and yet somehow has managed to pull up and not hit the ground and to go soaring off in this wonderful direction of self-autonomy and beauty and fun and sort of living life in a way that seems reckless but is also quite measured and canny, with a lot of humor and a lot of grace.

Nancy Juvonen:

Drew and Tom met at a formal sort of manager/let’s-talk-about-the-part meeting. Drew was so excited to meet Tom Green because she loved his show. When she got to the day of shooting, which was in January, there was really a lot of cute, coy flirting going on between the two of them. I mean, everybody sort of felt it in the air, that something was going on. And I think they had their first date after that. She was really smitten.

Richard Roeper, agitator, critic, Ebert & Roeper at the Movies:

I happened to be in the bleachers at Saturday Night Live on the night when Tom Green was hosting and was supposedly going to marry Drew at the end of the show. I figured it was a bit, but I also thought, Wouldn’t it be great to jump onstage and try to put a halt to it? Sure, I’d be arrested and Lorne Michaels would have me kicked out of show business, but it would have been worth it.

Amy Heckerling: You can’t suck on a cow’s udder and think that everybody is going to like it. You know?

Nancy Juvonen, on that guy:

The day they got engaged, she came over to my house… and she showed me the ring. And then we all took off for Magic Mountain, and we went on every single roller-coaster ride. And in between, we’d be waiting in line and we’d look at the ring — she’s engaged, she’s engaged, she’s engaged!

Amy Heckerling: At their wedding, they gave out a little booklet to everybody, a little passage to read. But the passage was about drag racing. I don’t know why. I’m still pondering. Adam Sandler was dancing around, doing the cutest, funniest dance I’ve ever seen in my life. It was kind of cowboy, not exactly knee-slapping, kind of rock ‘n’ roll, with that exuberance that transcends any need for grace. Courtney Love was singing karaoke and complaining about the equipment, of course. I don’t remember what song she did, but I remember that Cameron Diaz sang the Janis Joplin song “Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.” Frances Bean [Barrymore's goddaughter, the child of Love and the late Kurt Cobain] was the flower girl; she threw flower petals. Drew looked like a 1920s movie star; she was gorgeous. A dress like Jean Harlow’s that only people with kind of old-Hollywood glamour can pull off. Her figure, her face, the bee-stung lips that are just from another time — she was stunning. Tom shaved his beard.

Amy Pascal: She has a true inner life, and she also wants a whole life. I don’t think she thinks that being a movie star is a whole life.

Wes Craven, on his relationship with Barrymore in the years sinceScream:

It wasn’t like she just walked away. She stays in touch, she sends flowers on my birthday — she stays with you. She doesn’t just do it and move on. Drew keeps a large portion of heart in it, and that’s a dangerous thing to do. Probably one of the most reckless things she does is that. She shows her heart.

Justine Baddeley and Melissa Bochco:

MB: Once, when we were on a cruise, she just jumped off the ship! She wanted to swim, and we were sort of sitting in the water on a huge cruise ship — it’s like a ten-story hotel or something — and I remember I was up on the top deck and all these people started freaking out: “Drew Barrymore! Drew Barrymore jumped off the ship!” They had to send a coast guard.

JB: I remember that.

MB: And she swam to a nearby island and they had to send, like, a rescue boat. But they didn’t send it to rescue her. They sent it to get her to sign a release form that said they weren’t responsible.

Nancy Juvonen, on what friends are for:

I can actually remember her removing a spot from something in my living room, but I can’t remember what it was. Her dog was not fixed, so her dog would have a little spotting when she was going through heat.

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