Have you ever been watching Home Alone or Succession
and thought that the Culkin siblings must be drawing from personal experience?
Well, you might be onto something. The family history is filled with plenty of tragedy.
Kit Culkin and Patricia Brentrup, who never married, lived in a two-bedroom, railroad-style
walk-up on 94th Street and Second Avenue in New York City. They would eventually have five boys
and two girls, who all slept in bunk beds in one room. Kit worked at a Catholic church,
which allowed the kids to have discounted fees at the parish school, while Patricia worked for a
telephone-answering service. As casting director Billy Hopkins told New York Magazine in 2001,
"They were so poor I had to use my own money to make sure that Macaulay got to and from rehearsal.
[He] would crawl under the bleachers at the theater to look for change that had
fallen out of people's pockets. They were like the Beverly Hillbillies."
Despite all that, Patricia worked hard to give the kids some semblance of a normal life,
such as a Christmas tree and family dinners. That held everything together before Macaulay
began earning millions as a child actor. Patricia recounted to The Telegraph in 1996,
"We went through the hungry years, the struggling, and when we became successful
I thought we'd just sit back, enjoy it and relax. Instead, we were happier living hand-to-mouth,
and that's what's so hard. We don't get to enjoy what the whole family worked for together."
In his 2006 book Junior, Macaulay Culkin wrote a letter to his dad that read in part,
"Dear Father, It didn't have to be like this.
We could have stayed poor ... You showed me what it was like to be afraid ... You
hurt people a lot, you know ... You made a lot of people cry. You made my mother cry."
The picture wasn't much rosier when Macaulay told New York Magazine,
"The one thing he taught me was how not to be,
and how I don't want to be with my children. He was a bad guy."
After Kit and Patricia Brentrup separated, she detailed his, quote, "reign of terror" in court
affidavits, noting that he'd punched her while she was pregnant and given her bruises and black eyes.
In general, the family was a lot happier when Kit was away.
As Kieran Culkin recalled to Vanity Fair in 2018,
"Sometime in the 90s, he went away and disappeared for two,
three weeks, and the babysitter remarked to my mom, 'You know what's funny is their father's
been gone for three weeks, and not one of them has said, Hey, where's Dad?' Nobody cared, actually.
My mom was the parent, so when he wasn't there it was nicer and better."
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.
Kit Culkin was pushed toward child acting by his own stage mother, though his older sister Bonnie
Bedelia reached a higher level of success. Once Kit had a family of his own, he needed money.
His neighbor was a stage manager at the Ensemble Studio Theatre who needed a child actor,
and Macaulay was the right age and gender for the job, and he was essentially too young to say no.
"He latched onto this thing with Macaulay and took it for all it was worth
and became very, um, possessive."
While filming The Good Son in 1993, a 12-year-old Macaulay decided that he needed a break.
As he recalled to New York Magazine,
"I just said to Kit, 'Listen, I'm really getting tired and I'm not at school as much
as I'd like to be; I really need some time off.' He said, 'Yeah, sure,' and the next thing I knew,
I was on the next set doing the next thing, and it just kind of clicked in my brain:
'Okay. There's basically nothing I can do to make this stop.'"
The following year, Macaulay decided to quit acting.
Kit Culkin and Patricia Brentrup eventually separated after 20 years together.
She brought a lawsuit against him for custody of their seven children. He moved out of the family
apartment but stayed in the building, renting a one-bedroom apartment nine floors above. Patricia
ultimately received sole custody of their kids. Kit wasn't allowed visitation rights with his
older children after the teenaged Macaulay and Kieran indicated that they didn't want to see him.
During the custody suit, Macaulay finally learned that his net worth was around $50 million.
As he recalled to New York Magazine,
"My father would hide newspapers from me so I wouldn't read the stuff about him
or find out how much I was making. I can understand why they did that;
they didn't want me running off to my friends saying, 'I just made $8 million!'"
As for Kieran, he told The Irish Times in 2003,
"His main concern was that he could be our manager. He was OK with losing custody,
if he could still be our manager."
Following his parents' custody battle, Macaulay Culkin decided to seek control
of his own finances. He learned how to read court papers when he was just 14,
and he sued to remove his parents as his legal guardians. His $17 million fortune was ultimately
placed in the hands of a family accountant until he turned 18. As he explained to Esquire in 2020,
"It's always misconstrued, that I 'emancipated' myself from my parents. In 2020 I legally took my
parents' names off of my trust fund and found an executor, someone who would look over my finances,
just in case anyone wanted to stick their f---ing pinkie in the pie."
Macaulay's parents had taken the standard 15% management fee out of his paychecks, receiving
a total of $7.5 million over four years. But their financial situation took a nosedive once he
retired from acting. Part of Macaulay's motivation for the lawsuit was to win the ability to withdraw
money to buy a new apartment for his mother and siblings and to pay their school and legal fees.
On December 23, 1998, a fire started in the Culkin family's 19th-floor apartment in South Park Tower
on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The blaze began when paper ignited near a space heater.
As it grew, Patricia Brentrup evacuated the building with her children, but she allegedly left
the door to her apartment open, thereby unleashing the fire into the hallway and stairwell.
The flames took over the stairwell and killed four people on the floors above.
Patricia was subsequently met with an $80 million negligence lawsuit.
Macaulay Culkin wasn't living in the apartment building at the time, but he was implicated by
the media and sued for $113,000, though the case against him was ultimately dismissed.
Patricia and her children then moved into the apartment that Macaulay shared with his then-wife,
Rachel Miner. As Macaulay recalled to New York Magazine,
"It was a nice Christmas other than the fact that all their presents got burned ... and
their house. It made me feel good that we brought it all together and made it work.
It was awful, of course — people died — it was awful."
In September 2004, then-24-year-old Macaulay Culkin was pulled over in Oklahoma City.
He was accompanied by a 22-year-old friend from New York in the driver's seat, who was driving 70
miles per hour in a 60-mile per hour speed limit zone and had also made an improper lane change.
During the traffic stop, police officers searched the car and found a bag containing
marijuana and $3,000 in cash. They also found a cigarette box full of rolled joints, making for
17 grams altogether. Macaulay reportedly produced an additional bag of medication from his pocket,
which contained 16 milligrams of prescription drugs intended to treat anxiety and seizures.
He was arrested for "possession of a controlled dangerous substance without a valid prescription"
and "possession of marijuana" and briefly held in the Oklahoma County Jail.
He was ultimately released once he paid his $4,000 bail.
When Macaulay Culkin was just nine years old, he got a call from pop star Michael Jackson,
who invited the Culkin family to visit his California estate, Neverland Ranch.
Neverland was every child's dream: it featured a private zoo, a Ferris wheel, a movie theater,
a carousel, and go-carts. Macaulay began spending all of his vacations there and built a friendship
with Jackson based on a shared understanding of childhood fame, arrested development,
and pushy stage fathers who grew abusive. As Macaulay explained to New York Magazine,
"We had very similar experiences in childhood. It's not like I can just bump into people on the
street and say, 'Oh! You too!' It doesn't happen that often. Michael's still a kid.
I'm still a kid. We're both going to be about 8 years old forever in some place
because we never had a chance to be 8 when we actually were.
That's kind of the beautiful and the cursed part of our lives."
"I was a peerless person. You know, I was, like, yeah, you know like nobody else in
my Catholic school even had like- even like this much idea of what I was going through."
Following the 1993 child molestation case raised against Jackson, Macaulay expressed regret at
never speaking up and defending his friend. He got his chance during Jackson's 2005 trial.
On the stand, he confirmed that he and his siblings would often sleep in the same bed
with Jackson, but fully clothed with the door unlocked and their parents on site. He vehemently
denied allegations from Neverland staff that Jackson had touched him inappropriately.
In 2000, Kit Culkin's 30-year-old daughter Jennifer Adamson died of a drug overdose.
That wouldn't be the last tragic death that would befall the Culkin family.
On December 9, 2008, 29-year-old Dakota Culkin was crossing Lincoln Boulevard in
front of Brennan's Irish pub in Marina del Rey, California when she was fatally hit by a car.
Following Dakota's death, a grief-stricken Kieran Culkin gave up his role in Scott Pilgrim vs.
The World, although he eventually got another chance to take the part. But before accepting,
he warned director Edgar Wright that he'd dyed his hair green and gained weight from all the alcohol
he'd been drinking since his sister's death. As Kieran recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021,
"She was the funniest person in the family for sure and had a really dark sense of humor.
[Her death is] the worst thing that's ever happened, and there's no sugarcoating that one.
Each one of us handled it very differently. I think everyone was just torn up inside. [...] It's
always going to be devastating. I still weep about it out of nowhere."
Following the trial in which Macaulay Culkin sought control of his finances in the mid-90s,
Kit Culkin basically disappeared. But first, he stole all of Macaulay's movie memorabilia,
including costumes and photos. As Macaulay explained to The Guardian in 2000,
"What happened was that my father just was not
around one day. He just upped and left without explaining himself to anyone."
By disappearing, Kit was essentially walking out of Macaulay's life forever.
During an interview with Larry King in 2004, Macaulay admitted,
"[I] don't really have any desire to [see him]. People are like, 'Oh, isn't it sad that
you don't see your father anymore?' And it's like, you know, he's the only father I knew,
and he wasn't like taking us to, you know, baseball games or anything like that."
By 2001, Kit was broke and living in a two-bedroom condo in Arizona with his new partner,
who told New York Magazine that he would sometimes shut himself in a room to watch his kids' movies.
In 2014, he reportedly traveled to see Kieran in the Broadway play This is Our Youth.
It was the first time they'd seen each other in 17 years,
and they reportedly haven't spoken since. In 2021, Kieran told The Hollywood Reporter,
"F--- him. I don't care."
"I thought about it. F--- you."
As for Kit, when he was asked about Macaulay by the Daily Mail in 2016, he responded,
"I don't consider him a son anymore."
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse,
please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453)
or contact their live chat services.