Ewan McGregor used to attend Alcohol Anonymous.
The 45-year-old actor – who has four children Clara, 19, Jamyan, 15, Esther, 14, and Anouk, five, with his wife Eve Mavrakis – hasn’t touched a drop of booze for 15 years but he has admitted quitting his bad habit was really tough at first and he relied heavily on the counselling sessions.
He explained: "I didn’t go straight to AA. And I had a therapist, a sort of alcoholic specialist whom I spoke to for a while and that helped me give up and now I don’t do anything. I don’t drink at all. That’s it. It’s a nicer life."
The hunky star got sucked into alcohol when he was a child while growing up in Scotland but, since quitting, he now realises how hitting the bottle leads to shattered lives.
Speaking to The Times newspaper, he said: "I just drank because that’s what I’d done. That was my experience, I suppose. When I was a kid in Scotland, that’s what we did on the weekends. We would meet somewhere and drink, like a lot of kids do, to excess. I sort of got used to it and there was that hedonism of the mid-to-late Nineties, with Brit Cool and Brit Pop and Oasis and Blur … it just kept going.
"It just wasn’t so much fun anymore. So I decided to stop. It wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, it’s not an easy thing to do, especially here – the culture is so wrapped up in alcohol and drinking – but it was just one too many things in my life. I was an actor; I was a husband, a father, and I was a drinker. And the one I was willing to let go was the drinking. So I just did it and it made everything else so much easier."
Ewan McGregor attended Alcohol Anonymous
