Claire Danes never really had a childhood, said John Lahr in The New Yorker. The actress was raised in downtown New York by artsy parents—a mother who was “very child-like” and a wounded dad who’d lost his own mother and needed mothering himself. Her parents believed they should treat her as an equal, and Danes took the idea to heart and became “parentified”—a parent to her own parents. “I was playing grown-up,” says the 34-year-old. “A child’s idea of grown-up.” At age 3, she demanded, and was given, the seat at the head of the dining table. At 10, she announced her decision to become an actress during a family dinner. “I said, ‘I have to be true to my art. There is no plan B.’” Danes, who rode the subways alone at 11, says that pretending to be an adult took a toll on her. She often felt unprotected, and visited a psychiatrist after experiencing nightmarish visions of ghosts and gargoyles. “They were gonna suck me into some horrible place.” When she was 19 and already a famous actress, the apparitions reappeared after she took her first and last hit of the drug Ecstasy. “They were the same, except smaller. I was like, ‘Really, guys? You’re still here? I’m a grown-up. I’m done.’”
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