At the age of 3o, Selma Blair saw a fortune teller. She was a successful Hollywood actor – famous for her role in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, and about to set off for Prague to film Hellboy – but privately she was depressed, binge-drinking, and prone to periods of overwhelming despair. Seeing a psychic was in many ways a search for reassurance: about a body whose pain she didn’t understand (Blair would later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis), the scars of repeated sexual assault, and alcoholism that had almost killed her.
This is not the Selma Blair we know from the covers of Vanity Fair and Vogue, or the quirky roles that made her name. But it is one beautifully laid bare in her memoir, Mean Baby – named after the fact her perpetual frown as a newborn was said to make neighbourhood kids scream when they saw her. “From the very beginning I was misunderstood,” she writes. Growing up in Michigan with three sisters, Blair’s mother (described as her “first great love”) was the defining figure in her life and a complex presence: formidable, glamorous, fiercely loyal, and sometimes cruel.
