Lifetime is famous for outrageously dramatic twists and turns, and its stars' real lives
have also been filled with addictions, terrifying accidents, and sex scandals.
You might know Alexa PenaVega best as Carmen in the Spy Kids movies, the first of which
came out in 2001, but that's not all she's done.
In 2005, for example, she starred in the Lifetime movie Odd Girl Out as a victim of cyberbullying.
The former child star has been vocal about her complicated relationship with Hollywood.
The level of stardom she reached at such a young age ultimately pushed her and her husband
Carlos to leave Los Angeles and start a new life in Hawaii.
But before they moved, the PenaVega family experienced a bit of a medical disaster.
As it turns out, Alexa, a mother of three, was responsible for an accident that severed
the finger of her middle child, Kingston James.
As she revealed on Instagram,
"While getting the kids ready for bed, I shut Kingston's fingers in the hinge of the bathroom
door.
His first finger is bruised and a little bloody...but his middle finger took the brunt of it and
was severed from the first knuckle near the tip."
PenaVega got through the guilt and shame by praying, and fortunately Kingston recovered
quickly.
Anne Heche's on-screen career began back in 1987 when she played twins Vicky and Marley
on the soap opera Another World.
Her career really took off in the following decade, and then in 2004, she made her Lifetime
debut alongside Kristen Bell in the movie Gracie's Choice.
She would go on to appear in a number of other original features on the network.
But in August 2022, tragedy struck when Heche was in a serious accident, as the car she
was driving crashed into a house in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles.
This left her in a coma for a week.
During that time, Lifetime Executive VP and Head of Programming Amy Winter issued a statement
of concern for Heche.
Winter also noted that the movie she'd been working on, Girl in Room 13, was finished.
The story was about human trafficking, a subject close to Heche's heart.
Sadly, she didn't make it out of the coma, as she died from injuries related to the crash.
She was only 53.
Girl in Room 13 debuted later that year, and it was dedicated to her memory.
"Together, let's stop violence against women."
The CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men wouldn't have been the same without Jennifer Taylor,
who appeared on a total of 36 episodes of the show.
Introduced as nothing more than one of Charlie's many one-night-stands, her character Chelsea
eventually became one of the few women he ever truly loved.
Their relationship culminated with them getting engaged and subsequently breaking up, but
Taylor's career could've turned out very differently.
In 2008, Taylor almost walked away from acting because she couldn't provide for her family.
As she admitted in an interview with Medium in 2018,
"We were literally gonna lose our house.
I was getting to the point where I thought, 'Is it really worth it for me to do maybe
one or two guest stars a year and be so far away from our family?'
It was a really, really hard time.
I was literally face down on the floor pleading, 'God, tell me what you want me to do.
I'll do whatever you say.
Am I supposed to stop acting?
Because I will.'"
Taylor had resigned herself to leaving Los Angeles and moving to her Florida hometown
to become a teacher when she got the role of Chelsea.
This subsequently led to her carving out a space for herself on Lifetime, as she's appeared
in dozens of their made-for-TV-movies since 2013.
Kristen Wiig has taken on her fair share of dramatic roles, but she's of course best known
for comedies, like Bridesmaids, 2016's Ghostbusters, and her seven-season run as a cast member
on Saturday Night Live.
In 2015, she starred alongside Will Ferrell in the Lifetime thriller A Deadly Adoption.
But off screen, her life hasn't always been a barrel of laughs.
In August 2020, Wiig opened up about her painful fertility journey with InStyle.
She and her now-husband Avi Rothman got engaged in 2019, and they spent years trying to have
a baby.
As Wiig recalled,
"We've been together for about five years, and three of them were spent in an IVF haze.
Emotionally, spiritually, and medically, it was probably the most difficult time in my
life.
I wasn't myself.
There are so many emotions that go with it — you're always waiting by the phone and
getting test results, and it was just bad news after bad news.
[...] There was a lot of stress and heartache."
Wiig is generally very private when it comes to her personal life, but she wanted to share
her story because she felt that IVF wasn't talked about enough when she was going through
it.
She hoped that sharing her own experience could help someone else in the future.
Thankfully, there was a happy ending to Wiig and Rothman's story, as they welcomed twins
Shiloh and Luna via surrogate in January 2020 and tied the knot the following year.
"In my home, I'm very, uh, I'm very lucky about having these two babies."
Sarah Paulson has starred in a handful of made-for-TV movies during her career, including
Lifetime's A Christmas Wedding and Hallmark's November Christmas.
She's also been a regular on various Ryan Murphy TV series, especially the horror anthology
American Horror Story.
So chances are high that she's popped up on your screen at some point or another.
Despite her high profile, Paulson has always been private about her personal life, particularly
her early years, as she doesn't have the fondest memories of her childhood.
In 2016, she offered a rare glimpse into her past, as she revealed to The New York Times
that she had a "complicated" home life.
When Paulson was five years old, her aspiring writer mother moved Sarah and her sister from
Florida to New York without their father to pursue her dreams.
They lived in a small apartment in Queens, which included less-than-ideal arrangements,
like sleeping on a mattress on the floor for long periods of time.
Melissa Joan Hart has plenty of credits to her name, including the 2022 Lifetime movie
Dirty Little Secret.
But to a legion of fans, she'll always be best known as everybody's favorite teenage
witch, Sabrina Spellman.
She played the part from 1996 until 2003, but her time on the hit show almost ended
prematurely.
1999 was a big year for Hart.
Not only was she filming Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the spinoff movie Sabrina, Down
Under, she also appeared in Britney Spears' music video for "(You Drive Me) Crazy" and
starred in the rom-com Drive Me Crazy.
But that movie also led to a scandal that almost led to her getting fired from Sabrina.
As she recalled to USA Today in 2019,
"Archie Comics had a contract that I would never play [Sabrina] naked.
But then I did the cover of Maxim magazine, and for some reason — no idea how this happened
— Maxim had the cover say 'Sabrina' instead of 'Melissa'."
The interview for the article also included explicit references to a Playboy party that
Hart had attended.
The whole scandal came to a head at the premiere of Drive Me Crazy, as the actor recalled to
E!
"My lawyer comes up to me on the red carpet and basically says, 'Don't talk to the press,
you're being fired from your show,' And I'm like, 'I'm sorry, what?'"
Dynasty star Grant Show rose to fame as the tough but kind-hearted teen heartthrob Jake
Hanson on Melrose Place from 1992 to 1997.
But the years after Melrose went off air were not kind to Show, as he struggled to move
on both professionally and personally.
As he recalled to The New York Times in 2008,
"A few years after Melrose Place, when the luster of Melrose Place wore off and what
was left was just the stink and I was just doing bad TV movies, that was a personal low
point."
Those bad made-for-TV movies included the 1998 natural disaster flick Ice, which indeed
wasn't exactly met with glowing reviews.
The situation became so dire that there were periods when Show wasn't working at all.
Eventually, though, he was able to find a way forward.
It took a few years, but by 2003, he was back in leading roles, as he played Alex Lofton
in the Lifetime movie Sex and the Single Mom and its sequel two years later.
Nancy McKeon is probably best known as Jo on the '80s sitcom The Facts of Life or as
Jinny on the Lifetime police procedural The Division.
And you may have also seen her in the Lifetime movie You Light Up My Christmas.
Family is important to McKeon, who lives out of the spotlight on a ranch in Texas with
her husband Marc and their two daughters.
Unfortunately, in 2019 she suffered a series of terrible tragedies when she lost two family
members within two months of each other.
First, her father died that October.
The following month, she celebrated her brother Philip's birthday by writing on Instagram,
"A huge happy birthday to my big brother!!
It's been a tough time lately... but as we've always said...we'll get through it together…
love you Dude."
But sadly, Philip died in December from an ongoing illness.
A source close to McKeon told People Magazine that she and her family were dealing with
their losses together.
Beverly Hills, 90210 alum Shannen Doherty has emerged through plenty of scandals and
invasive tabloid coverage over the years.
Despite her struggles, she's managed to forge a successful showbiz career that's lasted
for decades.
Her passion for her craft is clear, and she's been fortunate to portray multiple iconic
characters.
She even revisited one of them when she played one of the mothers in the Paramount Network
TV reboot of Heathers in 2018.
But this was also a difficult time for Doherty, as she announced that she'd been diagnosed
with breast cancer in 2015.
"It's a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways."
"It's not fair.
Why me?"
"Oh, I definitely have days where I say 'Why me?', and then I go, 'Well, why not me?'"
In April 2017, Doherty happily announced that she was in remission.
But then in 2020, she revealed that the cancer had returned and progressed to Stage 4.
Now, it looks like something that she has to live with for the rest of her life.
And she plans to do a lot of living, as she believes that she's got at least a decade,
if not more, left in her.
As she told Elle in 2020,
"It's like anybody with Stage 4 faces this sort of thing, where others want to put you
out to pasture.
I'm not ready for pasture."
So Doherty is still doing what she's passionate about by continuing to act and direct.
And she recently found some symmetry in her career by playing a woman with breast cancer
in the 2021 Lifetime movie List of a Lifetime.
You might remember her as one of the coach's daughters in 2000's Remember the Titans, but
Hayden Panettiere got an even more massive break in 2006 when she started playing the
cheerleader Claire Bennet on NBC's Heroes.
The show ran for four seasons until 2010, and it wasn't long before Pannettiere scored
a role on another long-running TV show, as she played Juliette Barnes on ABC's Nashville
from 2012 to 2018.
Between her stints on those two series, she starred in the title role in Lifetime's true
crime film Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy.
Despite all that professional success, not everything was right behind the scenes.
Panettiere spent years coping with mental health and addiction issues, which began when
she was just 15.
Things only got worse after her daughter Kaya [KIE-uh] was born in 2014, as Pannettiere
suffered from postpartum depression and continued using drugs.
As she admitted to People Magazine in 2022,
"I didn't want to be around me.
But with the opiates and alcohol, I was doing anything to make me feel happy for a moment.
Then I'd feel worse than I did before.
I was in a cycle of self-destruction."
It took years for Panettiere to get out of that cycle, but she did eventually, and she
was happy to discover that she now had a second chance at life.
Before she was Aria on Pretty Little Liars, Lucy Hale starred in the 2009 Lifetime movie
Sorority Wars as college freshman Katie Parker.
The film was largely well received, and Hale's career was looking pretty good.
The following year, Pretty Little Liars debuted, and she remained a full-time cast member for
all seven seasons until 2017.
By the time that series ended, Hale was in her mid-twenties.
She'd already been in the spotlight for 15 years, and it had taken its toll.
She started drinking alcohol when she was just 14, and it became a problem shortly after.
And then things got even worse, as she struggled with an eating disorder, which she discussed
on The Diary of a CEO podcast in 2023.
"I hated myself so much that I couldn't even give it basic needs like food."
Although Hale found a way to deal with her eating disorder before Pretty Little Liars,
she continued drinking throughout the show's run.
She would often do so to the point of blacking out.
Her addiction stemmed from the sensation that alcohol made her feel like her true self.
As she put it:
"I just, like, held on to that belief that real Lucy came out when she was drinking."
Hale knew that she had a problem, though, and her journey to becoming sober began when
she was 20 years old.
In January 2023, when she was 33, she publicly celebrated her first year of sobriety.
Eric Roberts has carved out quite a Hollywood legacy for himself.
With over 700 acting credits to his name, he's easily one of the most prolific actors
in Hollywood.
You might also know him as the older brother of Julia Roberts and the father of Emma Roberts.
Part of his success has to do with his long-time relationship with the Lifetime Movie Network.
His most well-known Lifetime movies are the Stalked by My Doctor series, which debuted
in 2015.
Despite his consistent career, Roberts has never really been seen as a leading man.
This is in part due to his decades-long drug addictions to the likes of cocaine and marijuana.
This led to a falling out with his sister and hampered his career.
As he admitted to Vanity Fair in 2018,
"I met [Woody Allen when I was] very stoned, and he dismissed me, as well he should have.
I did that for about 10 years."
Roberts eventually realized that his behavior was a cry for help.
As he put it,
"The whole point being I was asking for help, saying, 'You see where I'm at—now help me,
because I'm worth helping.'
I get it now.
I just didn't get it when I should have."
He managed to overcome his cocaine addiction privately, but it wasn't until he went on
Celebrity Rehab in 2010 that he started to address his issues with marijuana.
Vanessa Williams is a triple threat in the entertainment industry.
As a singer, actor, and dancer, she's enjoyed quite the impressive career.
She's released eight studio albums, and her acting credits include a wide variety of genres
on both stage and screen, including the Lifetime movie The Courage to Love.
Alas, much of her life has been overshadowed by a trauma she experienced when she was just
a child.
When she was 10 years old, Williams tagged along on a family friend's summer holiday
to California.
During the trip, she was sexually abused by the family's older daughter.
On an episode of Oprah's Masterclass, Williams revealed that she felt conflicted about the
girl performing oral sex on her without her consent.
Part of that was because she didn't fully understand what was happening at the time.
"But I knew it felt good, but also something that was not supposed to be happening."
Ultimately, Wililiams decided not to tell anyone about it, but the experience haunted
her for years to come.
As she put it,
"At that young age, having that happen to you in your body, it awakens your sexuality
at an age where it shouldn't be awakened."
"I think it made me more sexually promiscuous and more curious at a younger age than I should
have been."
Christina Ricci has been a staple on screens ever since she iconically played Wednesday
Addams in 1991's The Addams Family.
She followed that up with the 1993 sequel Addams Family Values, as well as Casper, The
Ice Storm, Sleepy Hollow, and plenty of other movies and TV shows.
Over the years, she's continued to make diverse acting choices, including the 2015 Lifetime
miniseries The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, on which she played the titular ax murderer.
Although Ricci successfully made the transition from child to adult star, it wasn't easy,
as she experienced intense scrutiny over her body when she was young.
The constant fixation on her physical appearance, especially while she was going through puberty,
led to her developing anorexia.
As she revealed during an appearance on Today in 2022,
"People would basically all get together and look at you and decide how to fix everything
that was wrong with you.
And I never enjoyed those days of everybody talking about my flaws."
This scrutiny got worse as Ricci got older.
As she explained,
"When I was 12 or 13 and started to have boobs, they would talk about how to make me look
less womanly."
Ultimately, though, Ricci has taken strides not to continue the cycle, and she plans to
teach her daughter about the importance of eating for nutrition and not attaching any
unhealthy labels to food.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available.
Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact
SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).