Vision PBE

Actor Richard Dreyfuss' PBE

 On "Oscars' Night," in April, 1996, Barbara Walters followed the film awards with an hour's worth of celebrity interviews on 20/20.  Interviewee Richard Dreyfuss had been nominated for his role in the hit movie, Mr. Holland's Opus.  Soon the conversation went back to Dreyfuss' meteoric rise to stardom with such memorable films as The Goodbye Girl, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jaws. History has proven that such rapid success is often difficult to handle.  Dreyfuss was no exception.  Now fifty, he responded to Barbara's pointed questions with the hard-earned yet peaceful candor of one who has succumbed to addiction and overcome it.

The interview revealed that Dreyfuss' first marriage had fallen casualty to his troubled years, as had some great film roles.  Over twenty years of addiction recycling had come and gone.  The turning point occurred miraculously in a dark hour.  Dreyfuss was hospitalized in an effort to detox him yet again from the grasp of drugs and alcohol.  Hours passed.  As he sobered all alone in the hospital room, there entered a three-year-old girl in a pink dress and shiny black patent leather shoes.   She told him, "Daddy, I can't come to you until you come to me.  Please straighten out your life so I can come."  And she was gone.

But the pleading message of her haunting eyes was seared into Dreyfuss' memory, a constant inspiration to reorder his life so that his daughter might come.  With this sacred incentive he maintained sobriety, remarried, and prayed.  Within three years a daughter was born to Dreyfuss and his wife -- the same girl who had come to his hospital room.